StdTrip: Promoting the Reuse of Standard Vocabularies in Open Government Data

Linked Data is the standard generally adopted for publishing Open Government Data. This operation requires that a myriad of public information datasets be converted to a set of RDF triples. A major step in this process is deciding how to represent the database schema concepts in terms of RDF classes and properties. This is done by mapping database concepts to a vocabulary, which will be used as the base for generating the RDF representation. The construction of this vocabulary is extremely important, because it determines how the generated triples interlink the resulting dataset with other existing ones. However, most engines today provide support only to the mechanical process of transforming relational to RDF data. In this chapter, we discuss this process and present the StdTrip framework, a tool that supports the conceptual modeling stages of the production of RDF datasets, promoting the reuse of W3C recommended standard RDF vocabularies or suggesting the reuse of non-standard vocabularies already adopted by other RDF datasets.