Retaining Semantics in Relational Databases by Mapping them to RDF

Across various domains, the relational model for databases is employed extensively for the purpose of storing, managing and retrieving data. The translation, however, of data modeling schemes such as entity-relationship (ER) diagrams into relational databases is accompanied by a certain loss of semantics as expressed by these models. With the growth of the semantic web, an effort has to be made in the direction of expressing these relational databases in a form and language that may be machine processable and such that they make the semantics as expressed by the database more explicit. This paper presents a methodology for expressing relational databases in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language, which has even been referred to as the language of the Semantic Web.