The 9th Conference for Informatics and Information Technology (CIIT 2012)

OPEN UNIVERSITY DATA

Martin Mitrevski, Milos Jovanovik, Riste Stojanov, Dimitar Trajanov
Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University
Skopje, Republic of Macedonia
ABSTRACT
Today, there is a growing trend for publishing public data
in an open format, on the web, making it available for
everyone to use and reuse. This idea has been widely
supported by governments and companies throughout the
world, which have made their own public data available in
such way. Some of them, like the World Bank, even
challenge developers to write applications based on their open
data, by organizing competitions [1]. Data has become the
new raw material of the 21st century [2]. The Linked Open
Data project has begun turning the document-oriented web
into a database of global proportions [3].
The Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering joins
this trend by making parts of its public data available as open
data. This paper introduces a system for mapping relational
data from databases into data represented in semantic web
format (N3 and RDF), as well as editing and querying the
data by using a SPARQL endpoint. Here we describe the
process of publishing the open data from our Faculty, as well
as some basic information from the other faculties which are
part of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
We also propose some possible applications which can use
this open data, and in that way add more value to it.
I.

INTRODUCTION

Most information systems today store their data in

relational databases. The data they store usually has parts of
it which are not public by their nature, so they must not be
made openly available. Therefore, there is a need for a
mechanism that would automatically publish data on the web
in a semantic web format, by extracting only specific
information from the relational databases. One problem is that
the tools that are developed for mapping a database into a
desired format do not provide a way to select only specific
parts from the database; they usually map the entire database.
Another problem is that they do not provide options to link
that data to other well-known ontologies and semantically
annotated data on the web. This must be done manually. This
implies creating another layer on top of these tools to provide
the necessary requirements. This paper discusses one possible
way to do this.
Another challenge is the ontology engineering. There are
a lot of available ontologies on the web, especially for
describing academic environments. The ontology repository
should contain ontologies that best match the scope of our
data, but still link to most of the data from other universities.
A balance should be made between these two choices when
choosing the ontologies. Another issue is that new ontologies
are created every day and it is not possible to predict which
university ontology would be the most popular in the future.

2012 Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

There should be an easy way to switch the link to other

ontologies, if the chosen ones lose their wide support, because
it is more useful to have your data linked with as much as
possible other external entities. The flexibility of editing the
ontology repository is important for another reason - what if
we make changes in the database and some tables are not
needed anymore, and others are added? And what if we
decide to publish data that we previously considered private?
A possible solution is presented in the paper.
II. RELATED WORK
As we mentioned before, the trend of publishing data on
the web in an open and semantic web format is very popular
in the academic environments. There are few universities,
most of them in the UK, which have already started open data
projects. They publish schedules, modules, subjects,
phonebooks of the employees, etc. Besides them, other
institutions such as the Governments in UK, USA and
Netherlands, World Bank, NASA, BBC, ACM and Amazon
have also made available some of their data on the web [4].
The governments publish lots of public information about
their work, such as contracts, how they spend the citizens'
money, who their ministers are meeting, etc [5]. There are
already some excellent mobile applications in the UK using
this data [5]. The data is available either in RDF, N3, Excel,
XML format or as JSON objects [6].
There are many tools for achieving this, such as D2R
Server [7], Oracle Spatial 11g [8], Asio Semantic Bridge [9],
SquirrelRDF [10] and many others. We use the D2R Server,
which enables RDF and HTML browsers to navigate the
content of the database, and allows applications to query the
database using the SPARQL query language [7]. The other
tools will not be discussed in this paper.
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The system for creating open and linked data from
relational databases consists of five parts: the relational
database, the D2R Server, the Mapping Tool, the Ontology
Repository and the RDF Documents, and the SPARQL
endpoint, called Snorql, for previewing the data (Figure 1).
In a nutshell, the Open Data Database gets data from the
FCSE DB. The data is mapped by the D2R Engine,
generating an N3 file, which is then converted by the
Mapping Tool into an RDF file. The RDF file can be
expanded to xml-like tree. Then the tree can be annotated
with the ontologies from the Repository very easily, just by
right clicking on the element we want to annotate and
selecting one of the ontologies we added to the repository.
Then the RDF file is stored within the RDF documents
Repository, and can be used later. It is also converted back

The 9th Conference for Informatics and Information Technology (CIIT 2012)

into N3 file so the D2R Server can invoke the SPARQL

endpoint and show the linked structured data. The data can be
queried with SPARQL Query Language and is accessible in
few formats, so it can also be extracted and used in other
applications.

Figure 1: System Architecture.

We will go into more details on the parts of the system
further in this paper.
IV. DATABASE
The data of the Faculty of Computer Science and
Engineering is stored in a relational database on a Microsoft
SQL Server. It contains confidential information about the
employees and the students, which must not be published on
the web. To protect this sensitive data, the D2R server should
not do the mapping directly on this database, because it is not
secure and reliable. For this reason, the Open Data DB is
created. This database contains only the data which we want
to make public. It extracts data from the original database,
and is updated whenever there are changes in the source
database, using SQL Queries. In this way, we manage to
avoid consistency problems.

V. THE MAPPING TOOL

The D2R Server lacks an interface which can enable us to
link ontologies to the tables. Therefore, the data that is
previewed in the SPARQL Endpoint is just open structured
data, it is not linked to the Linked Data Cloud and is not very
useful, because Semantic Web Browsers cannot associate it
with already existing data types to provide context. The
D2RQ Platform only enables manually editing the generated
N3 file using the D2RQ Mapping Language [7].
Manually editing the N3 file can be time consuming,
prone to errors, ineffective and impractical, especially when
there are a lot of tables to annotate. These reasons led us to
create the Mapping Tool, which is a web application that
utilizes the D2R Server functionalities to provide an easier
and simpler way to connect the data with existing ontologies
(Figure 2). It is a modification of an application for
annotating web services [11]. The application can support the
whole process of entering a database, generating an N3 file
via the D2R Server, converting the N3 to RDF file, and then
after the user annotates the file, converting it back to N3 and
previewing it in the endpoint. The Mapping Tool can also
accept already generated N3 or RDF files for annotation.
Ontologies can be easily added to the Ontology Repository.
The user can choose some class or property from the visual
tree and add or remove references.
The conversion from N3 to RDF file and vice versa is
done using the conversion functions of the SemWeb Library
[12]. XSL transformations are used for parsing tags of the
ontology into objects which are needed for the dynamic
creation of the interface for selecting ontology. The D2R
Server is started from the application as an external process
with its batch file. The xml-like tree is dynamically generated
using the classes from the Microsoft .Net library for working
with XML. Adding reference to an element of the tree is done
with the Stream Writer for data transfer into byte streams.
The substitution of the old element with the new annotated
element is done using the String Builder .NET class.

This database contains information about all the faculties

in our university such as names, addresses, phones, email and
web pages. We publish more information about our Faculty Institutes, Modules, Programs, Courses, Subjects and
Employees.
The D2R Server just maps the tables from this database
and the generated N3 file contains only the mapping, and not
the data. The data is retrieved from the Open Data DB, which
means that changes in the database will reflect on the data in
the SPARQL endpoint. There is no need to store the Semantic
Data in a dedicated RDF triple store, because requests from
the Web are rewritten into SQL queries via the mapping. This
on-the-fly translation allows publishing of RDF from large
live databases [7].

Figure 2: The Mapping Tool.

In the left upper corner is the RDF Repository, which
contains the RDF files which are expanded in the RDF tree in
the middle. Below the RDF Repository is the Ontologies
Repository, which can be expanded with new ontologies. By

The 9th Conference for Informatics and Information Technology (CIIT 2012)

right clicking on the desired RDF class or property tag on the

tree, there is an interface for adding or removing annotations.
If the user chooses to add an ontology, a new dialog box is
shown with the ontologies extracted from the Ontologies
Repository as link buttons and the user selects one of them. If
there is already an annotation for that tag, it is replaced with
the latest one. Above the RDF repository (not displayed on
Figure 2), there is a form which enables creating mapping
from scratch. The user enters the database name, username
and password, the name of the generated output file and then
the application finds the database from the MS SQL Server,
generates both N3 and RDF files using the D2R Server, and
adds the RDF file into the RDF repository so it can be
annotated.
VI. ONTOLOGY REPOSITORY
We rarely have to start from scratch when defining an
ontology; there is almost always an ontology available from a
third party that provides at least a useful starting point for our
own ontology [13]. And of course, the idea of the semantic
web is to link your data with already existing data. As we
mentioned before, there are universities around the world that
have already started to develop tools and ontologies for
opening up and linking their data. For that reason, we try as
much as possible to use and combine those well known
ontologies according to our needs.
The standard ontology for describing persons, their
activities and their relations to other people and objects,
Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [14], is used for the employees of
the Faculty. For describing the internal organizational
structure of the academic environment, the Academic
Institution Internal Structure Ontology [15] is used. However,
it has certain limitations in describing some of the properties
of our data. That is why we use another similar ontology University ontology [16], which contains those additional
features required. We connect the locations of our faculties
and institutes to the Semantic Cloud with the GeoNames
Ontology [17] and the time features with the Timeline
ontology [18]. For other relationships between the classes, the
Dublin Core Metadata Vocabulary [19] is used.
These ontologies covered our database tables as shown in
Figure 3. Most of the classes of the ontologies describing
academic entities shared the same names as Open Data
database tables, except for the Course, whose definition
corresponds to the Subjects table of our database, and the
Courses for that subject correspond to the definition of the
CourseGroup from the ontology.
This was not the only way to create the ontology. There
are some other works for this domain, such as DBpedia's
ontology about universities [20]. Universities in the UK
create their own ontologies to describe some of their unique
characteristics. It is very easy to switch to DBpedia or these
other ontologies - the annotation of the class or object
property should be changed with the Mapping Tool or by
manually editing the N3 file.

Figure 3: The database tables and properties annotated with

existing ontologies. Only the data that is annotated is
displayed, other properties like IDs which are mapped with
the local vocabulary are not displayed.
VII. PREVIEWING AND COLLECTING SEMANTIC DATA
The SPARQL endpoint of the D2RQ platform [7] shows
the data in triples: subject, predicate and an object. In the
endpoint, there is a text area for writing SPARQL queries for
browsing the data. The results of the queries can also be
shown in JSON, XML and XML+XSL format [7], so this
data can be used by both web and mobile applications. A nice
feature of the SPARQL endpoint is that SPARQL queries are
automatically generated while browsing the data through
clicking the triples.
The data can be accessed in three ways: RDF browsers,
traditional HTML browsers, and SPARQL query clients [7].
Since RDF browsers are not used widely, accessing the data
with traditional browsers is a very important characteristic of
the D2R Server. This is done by having XHTML
representation of every resource, which is retrieved by the
browsers [7]. Beside previewing and browsing, the data can
be indexed using search engines.
The example in Figure 4 displays information about the
subject Network Programming. It can be noted that
information like credits, term, name are linked with other
ontologies and information like the ID of the subject and the
IDs of the courses for that subject are mapped with the local
vocabulary generated by the D2R Server. From the Results
dropdown list the user can choose the format of the output
(triples, JSON, XML or XML+XSL).
VIII.

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS

The goal of publishing our data in an open and

semantically annotated format is to encourage programmers
to use this data to write applications which can be very useful
for our students. For example, applications with semantic
search can be made to find out in which subjects the
technology or research field of interest of the student is

The 9th Conference for Informatics and Information Technology (CIIT 2012)

thought, and at what level. To do this, all the subjects should

be linked with the corresponding technologies. That link can
provide the student with whole lot of additional resources that
are connected to the cloud for that particular technology.

a structured format - whether this is personal, government,

scientific, medical or enterprise data has huge potential to
provide solutions to all kinds of problems, so we hope this
initial work will encourage other institutions in the country to
follow us in publishing their data on the web in an open
format.
REFERENCES
[1]

World Bank - Apps for Development Challenge:

http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/ (retrieved on
06.03.2012)

[2]

Berners-Lee, T. and Shadbolt, N., There's gold to be mined from

all our data. The Times, London, 2011.

[3]

Wood, D., Linking Enterprise Data, Springer, Virginia, USA,

2010.

[4]

Kundra, V., Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through

Open Data and the Network Effect. Joan Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 2012.

[5]

UK government - Opening up government: http://data.gov.uk/

(retrieved on 06.03.2012)

[6]

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - RDF and SQL:

http://www.w3.org/wiki/RdfAndSql (retrieved on 06.03.2012)

[7]

Bizer, C, and Cyganiak, R., Publishing Databases on the

Semantic Web, D2R Server Technical Note, University of Berlin,
2007.

[8]

Oracle Spatial 11g:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatial/over
view/introduction/index.html

[9]

Asio Semantic Bridge for Relational Databases:

http://bbn.com/technology/knowledge/asio_sbrd

Figure 4: An example SPARQL query.

Also, if the grades of the students are made public, an
intelligent portal for rating the students by their knowledge of
technologies and computer skills can be made. The rating
could be computed by the grades from the subjects that are
connected with the skill or technology and the projects made
by the student. This will enable companies to find the most
suitable student to work for them.
This would also give advantage to our best students when
they look for a job and would motivate the others to do a
better job.
IX. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we presented a mechanism for publishing
data from relational databases on the Semantic Web. We
introduced our Mapping Tool for annotating the data, and we
described our Ontology Repository. There is still a lot of
work to be done with this system. First, improvements can be
made in our Ontology Repository, which should be expanded
with more ontologies for the data which is still not annotated
and has only meaning described with local vocabulary. Also,
there is still data that is public in its nature, but is not
published with this work. The Mapping Tool can be improved
by using machine learning algorithms to automatically
propose ontology annotations for the database tables
depending on the name and data of the tables.
By opening its data, the Faculty could provide better
understanding of its structure and its operations. Giving
access to data can be beneficial to both the Faculty and the
students. Thinking beyond the Faculty's scope, sharing data in

[10] SquirrelRDF: http://jena.sourceforge.net/SquirrelRDF/

[11] K. Budinoski, M. Jovanovik, R. Stojanov, D. Trajanov , An
Application For Semantic Annotation Of Web Services, 7th
International Conference for Informatics and Information
Technology, February 2010.
[12] SemWeb.NET: Semantic Web/RDF Library for C#/.NET:
http://razor.occams.info/code/semweb/ (retrieved on 06.03.2012)
[13] Antoniou, G., and Van Harmelen, F., A Semantic Web primer.
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2008, page
226.
[14] Brickley, D., and Miller, D., FOAF Vocabulary Specification
0.98, 2010.
[15] Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology (AIISO):
http://vocab.org/aiiso/schema (retrieved on 06.03.2012)
[16] Moving towards a university ontology: http://74-220-20899.bluehost.com/blog/moving-toward-a-university-ontology
(retrieved on 06.03.2012)
[17] GeoNames ontology:
http://www.geonames.org/ontology/documentation.html
(retrieved on 06.03.2012)

The 9th Conference for Informatics and Information Technology (CIIT 2012)
[18] The timeline ontology:
http://motools.sourceforge.net/timeline/timeline.html (retrieved on
06.03.2012)
[19] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative:
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ (retrieved on
06.03.2012)
[20] The DBpedia Data Set: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets
(retrieved on 06.03.2012)