Streaming transformation of XML to RDF using XPath-based mappings

ABSTRACT

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a widely adopted data interchange format. With the rise of Linked Data published using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a number of tools for transforming XML to RDF have been developed. Specifying XML→RDF mappings for these tools often requires skills in programming languages such as XSLT or XQuery. Moreover, these tools are rarely able to deal with large XML inputs. We introduce an XML to RDF transformation approach, which is based on mappings comprising RDF triple templates that employ simple XPath expressions. Thanks to the restricted XPath expressions, which can be evaluated against a stream of XML data, our implementation can handle extremely large input XML files. To process the XML input efficiently, we employ XML filtering techniques and a strategy for selecting relevant XML nodes to generate RDF triples from. We show that the time complexity of our mapping algorithm is linear in the size of the XML input and also prove its practical efficiency with an evaluation on large real-world data.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document preparation

      • Markup languages

• Information systems

  • Data management systems

    • Information integration

    • Middleware for databases

      • Object-relational mapping facilities

  • World Wide Web

    • Web data description languages

      • Markup languages