EM3B2 – a semantic integration engine for materials science

Abstract

Purpose – The integration and retrieval of the vast data have attracted sufficient attention, thus the W3C workgroup releases R2RML to standardize the transformation from relational data to semantic-aware data. However, it only provides a data transform mechanism to resource description framework (RDF). The generation of mapping alignments still needs manual work or other algorithms. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a domain-oriented automatic mapping method and an application of the R2RML standard. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, materials science is focussed to show an example of domain-oriented mapping. source field concept and M3B2 (Metal Materials Mapping Background Base) knowledge bases are established to support the auto-recommending algorithm. As for the generation of RDF files, the idea is to generate the triples and the links, respectively. The links of the triples follow the object-subject relationship, and the links of the object properties can be achieved by the range individuals and the trail path. Findings – Consequently based on the previous work, the authors proposed Engine for Metal Materials Mapping Background Base (EM3B2), a semantic integration engine for materials science. EM3B2 not only offers friendly graphical interfaces, but also provides auto-recommending mapping based on materials knowledge to enable users to avoid vast manually work. The experimental result indicates that EM3B2 supplies accurate mapping. Moreover, the running time of E3MB2 is also competitive as classical methods. Originality/value – This paper proposed EM3B2 semantic integration engine, which contributes to the relational database-to-RDF mapping by the application of W3C R2RML standard and the domain-oriented mapping.