Platform independent pathbuilder
@tom and I were curious if there is a way to automatically generate arbitrary relational database schemes from a pathbuilder description (hierarchical SQL field
RDF path mapping
) and also if it is possible translate data between these formats.
This is what the pathbuilder does already, but it translates between Drupal Entity abstractions and RDF and not relational databases and RDF. We want a pathbuilder that is not WissKI/Drupal specific.
Why would we want this?
- Pretty much every system out there supports relational databases, if we have some platform-independent layer that can translate this data into RDF we can basically use any off-the-shelf system.
- Allows RDFifying every relational dataset, even outside of WissKI
- Better performance compared to WissKI, since we don't have to work directly on the triplestore
- We can change the modeling or even the whole ontology on the fly, by just changing the pathbuilder mapping and then just dump a newly generated RDF export into the triplestore
Features we would want from this software:
- generation of relational database schemes from a pathbuilder specification
- generation of a pathbuilder template from a relational database scheme
- translation of relational datasets into RDF and vice-versa, given the pathbuilder specification
- handle live edits of the pathbuilder. Whenever the pathbuilder changes, update the relational DB scheme and migrate the data accordingly if necessary (e.g. move data to new tables, columns)