Interactively Mapping Data Sources into the Semantic Web.

The Linked Open Data continues to grow rapidly, but a limitation of much of the data that is being published is the lack of a semantic description. While there are tools that help users to quickly convert a database into RDF, they do not provide a way to easily map the data into an existing ontology. This paper presents an approach that allows users to interactively map their structured sources into an existing ontology and then use that mapping to generate RDF triples. This approach automatically generates a mapping from the data source into the ontology, but since the precise mapping is sometimes ambiguous, we allow the user to interactively refine the mappings. We implemented this approach in a system called Karma, and demonstrate that the system can map sources into an ontology with minimal user interaction and efficiently generate the corresponding RDF.