Declarative Data Exchange: Spreadsheets to RDF/OWL.

Integrating and accessing data from the many existing formats is a key challenge for the Semantic Web. In particular, representing and understanding non-RDF/OWL data in terms of ontologies is important for reasoning about this data and its relationships to other data, and for extracting or accessing the data itself. This paper presents a declarative method for mapping and translating spreadsheet data to RDF/OWL. First, a declarative mapping language is presented. Then, for this syntax, the paper presents a declarative semantics in terms of matrix operations as abstractions over spreadsheets and the relations therein. The language supports arbitrary search and indexing functions over spreadsheet data and allows the generation of complex associations and aggregations in the RDF/OWL output. Imperative and functional implementations of the mapping and extraction technology are presented.