Tim Berners-Lee Created

Date: September 1998.

$Id: RDB-RDF.html,v 1.25 2009/08/27 21:38:09 timbl Exp $

Status: . Editing status: Comments please. An parenthetical discussion to the Web Architecture at 50,000 feet. and the Semantic Web roadmap.

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Relational Databases on the Semantic Web

There are many other data models which RDF's Directed Labelled Graph (DLG) model compares closely with, and maps onto. See a summary in

One is the Relational Database (RDB) model.

The Semantic Web and Entity-Relationship models

Is the RDF model an entity-relationship mode? Yes and no. It is great as a basis for ER-modelling, but because RDF is used for other things as well, RDF is more general. RDF is a model of entities (nodes) and relationships. If you are used to the "ER" modelling system for data, then the RDF model is basically an openning of the ER model to work on the Web. In typical ER model involved entity types, and for each entity type there are a set of relationships (slots in the typical ER diagram). The RDF model is the same, except that relationships are first class objects: they are identified by a URI, and so anyone can make one. Furthurmore, the set of slots of an object is not defined when the class of an object is defined. The Web works though anyone being (technically) allowed to say anything about anything. This means that a relationship between two objects may be stored apart from any other information about the two objects. This is different from object-oriented systems often used to implement ER models, which generally assume that information about an object is stored in an object: the definition of the class of an object defines the storage implied for its properties.

For example, one person may define a vehicle as having a number of wheels and a weight and a length, but not foresee a color. This will not stop another person making the assertion that a given car is red, using the color vocabular from elsewhere.

Apart from this simple but significant change, many concepts involved in the ER modelling take across directly onto the Semantic Web model.

The Semantic Web and Relational Databases

The semantic web data model is very directly connected with the model of relational databases. A relational database consists of tables, which consists of rows, or records. Each record consists of a set of fields. The record is nothing but the content of its fields, just as an RDF node is nothing but the connections: the property values. The mapping is very direct

Indeed, one of the main driving forces for the Semantic web, has always been the expression, on the Web, of the vast amount of relational database information in a way that can be processsed by machines.

RDF's serialization format -- its syntax in XML -- is a very suitable format for expressing relational database information.

Special aspects of the RDB model

Relational database systems manage RDF data, but in a specialized way. In a table, there are many records with the same set of properties. An individual cell (which corresponds to an RDF property) is not often thought of on its own. SQL queries can join tables and extract data from tables, and the result is generally a table. So, the practical use for which RDB software is used typically optimized for doing operations with a small number of tables some of which may have a large number of elements.

A fundamental aspect of a database table is that often the data in a table can be definitive. Neither RDF nor RDB models have simple ways of expressing this. For example, not only does a row in a table indicate that there is a red car whose Massachusetts plate is "123XYZ", but the table may also carry the unwritten semantics that if any car has a Massachusetts plate then it must be in the table. (If any RDF node has "Massachusetts plate number" property then than node is a member of the table) The scope of the uniquenes of a value is in fact a very interest property.

The original RDB model defined by E.F. Codd included datatyping with inheritance, which he had intended would be implememnted in the RDB products to a greater extent that it has. For example, typically a person's home address house number may be typed as an an integer, and their shoe size may also be also be typed as an integer. One can as a result join to tables through those fields, or list people whose shoe size equals their house number. Practical RDB systems leave it to the application builder to only make operations which make sense. Once a database is expreted onto the Web, it becomes possible to do all kinds of strange combinations, so a stronger typing becomes very useful: it becomes a set of inference rules.

In a pure RDB model, every table has a primary key: a column whose value can be used to uniquely identify every row. Some products do not enforce this, leading to an ambiguity in the significance of duplicate rows. A curious feature is that the primary key can be changed without changing the identity of a row. (A person can change their name for example). SQL allows tables to be set up so that such changes can cascade through the local system to preseve referential integrity. This clearly won't work on the Web. One solution is to use a row ID -- which many systems do in fact use although SQL doesn't expose it in a standard way. Another is for the application to coinstrain the primary key not to change. Another is to put up with links breaking.

RDB systems have datatypes at the atomic (unstructured) level, as RDF and XML will/do. Combination rules tend in RDBs to be loosely enforced, in that a query can join tables by any columns which match by datatype -- without any check on the semantics. You could for example create a list of houses that have the same number as rooms as an employee's shoe size, for every employee, even though the sense of that would be questionable.

The new SQL99 standard is going to include new object-oriented features, such as inherited typing and structured contents of cells - arrays and structs. This RDB model with things from the OO world. I don't deal with that here in that the RDF model works as a lowest commoin denominator being able to express either and both.

Schemas and Schemas

A difference between XML/RDF schemas (and SGML) on the one hand and database schemas on the other is the expectation that there will be a relatively small number of XML/RDF schemas. Many web sites will export documents whose structure is defined by the same schema, and this is in fact what provides the interoperability.

A database schema is, as fasr as I know, created independently for each database. Even if a million companies clone the same form of employee database, there will be a million schemas, one for each database.

It may be that RDF will fill a simple role in simply expressing the equivalence of the terms in each database schema.

Exposing a database on the Web

In order to be able to access a table, and make extra statements about it which will enable its use in more and more ways, the essential objects of the table must be exported as first class objects on the Web.

When mapping any system onto the Web, the mapping into URI space is critical. Here we are doing this common operation generically for all relational databases. It is obviously usefuil for this to be done in a consistent ways between multiple vendors would be useful - an area for possible standardization.

Here is a random example I may have gotten wrong, basd on whatI understand of the naming within databases. The database itself is defined within a schema which is listed in a catalog.

Mapping an RDB into the Web - strawman
Catalog http://www.acme.com/mycat
Schema http://www.acme.com/mycat/schema1
Database http://www.acme.com/mycat/schema1/empdb/ Relative:
Table /mycat/schema1/empdb/emps emps
Column name /mycat/schema1/empdb/emps/shoe emps/shoe
View /mycat/schema1/empdb/emps2 emps2
Row /mycat/schema1/empdb/emps/rowid=123 emps/rowid=123
Cell /mycat/schema1/empdb/emps/rowid=123;col=shoe emps/rowid=123;col=shoe
Arbitrary query /mycat/schema1/empdb/?select+empno+from[...] ?select[...]

2002 version, see real code implemented by Dan Connolly:

What Uriref relative to http://www.acme.com/wherever/ rdf:type

Database description of database "personnel"


(say - whatever)

soc:Work, rdfdocument, db:DatabaseDescription
The conceptual database(a table of tables??) personnel#_database

(Arbitrary, must not clash, linked by db:describes from personnel)

A document giving all the data in the database. May support PUT? personnel/_data

(Arbitrary, must not clash with table names, linked by db:allData from personnel)

soc:Work, rdfdocument
The concept of the table "employees": The class of exactly those things which are in the table.


(was: personnel#employees, but changed to allow it to be deref'd to giev useful data)

(defined in personnel)

rdfs:Class, db:Table
A description of the table. Optimization: includes the current size of the table. Identifies primary key if any. personnel/employees

(Convention. The bit of the classname before the #)

soc:Work, rdfdocument, db:TableDescription
A description of all the tables. Just an (optional) optimization. personnel/_all

(Arbitrary, must not clash, linked by db:tableSchemas from personnel/employees)

soc:Work, rdfdocument, db:TableDescription
The concept of a column in the table, the Property something has iff that is recorded in the table. personnel/employees#email

(Defined in personnel/employees)

rdf:Property, db:Column
A document giving all the data in the table. May support PUT personnel/employees/_data

(Arbitrary, must not clash, linked by db:tableData from personnel/employees)

soc:Work, rdfdocument,
A document giving the data in the row for which the primary key is 1234. (Iff primary key exists). May support PUT personnel/employees/1234

(Convention. Note the primary key value must be encoded suitably!)

soc:Work, rdfdocument
The concept of the thing describd by that row.



(when primary key exists, then employees#_data etc use this URIref for the item 1234 intead of making anonymous nodes)


A document giving the information in just one cell personnel/employees/1234/email


[ is rdf:domain of personnel/employees#email ]
Arbitrary query personnel/_sql?select+empno+from[...]

(arbitrary, linked by db:sqlService from personnel if supported.)

soc:Work, rdfdocument
Arbirary HTML form field match (select * from employees where email like "*fred*") [@details] personnel/_fquery?email=*fred*;name=Joe

(arbitrary, linked by db:formService from personnel if supported)

soc:Work, rdfdocument
POST point for RDF data, either new data, or assertions that some (n3) Formula is a log:Falsehood.


(arbitrary, linked by db:deltaService from personnel if supported. Could be same URI personnel in fact, as we are dealing iwth a different method)


@@@ How to use typing to indicate that the URI in the table is a (relative?) URI to another object, not a string?

@@@ This works fine when implemented live on a database. However, it is a little tricky to emulate in a typical file-based web server because of the use of "personnel" in this case both as directory and as

One of the things which makes life easier is to make the mapping so that the relative URI syntax can be used to advantage. For example, here, everything within the database (the scope of an SQL statement) can be writted as a short URI.

There is a question as to how much of the SQL query syntax should be turned into identifier. For example, is a query on a primary key really an identifier? Is the extraction of a single cell really an identifier? It would be useful to be able to treat them as such. However, it would be wiser to use the "?" convention to indicate a generalized SQL idempotent query. (A URL should of course never be used to refer to the results of a table-changing operation such as UPDATE or DELETE. In this case, if HTTP were used, an SQL query should IMHO be POST ed to the database URI. Of course, you can use your favorite networked database access protocol)

In the above the column name of the table could be refered to using the table as a namespace, a row for example being


and one row of the the result of joining this table (of people) and another table (about people) by their primary keys would use namespaces from both tables:


Later related work:

R2O, an Extensible and Semantically Based Database-to-Ontology Mapping Language. Barrasa J, Corcho O, GÃ³mez-PÃ©rez A. Second Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases (SWDB2004). Toronto, Canada. August 2004.

This has been elaborated with help of an RDB tutorial and discussion from Andrew Eisenberg/Sybase.

See also: Why RDF is more than XML

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