Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Most Semantic Web applications are still unable to query data stored in relational databases using their own built-in functionality. Hence, needing access to such data, they have to fall back on SQL and the relational model. In this paper we describe Relational.OWL, our technique to automatically extract the semantics of relational databases and transform this information into a machine processable and understandable representation. Since this data can now be queried using semantic query languages, it has to be analyzed whether this combination of Relational.OWL and e.g. RDQL can be a real alternative to the commonly used SQL access to relational data.