Directly Mapping RDF Databases to Property Graph Databases

TL;DR

This paper introduces three formal methods for directly transforming RDF databases into property graph databases, ensuring semantics and information preservation, thereby demonstrating the data model's subsumption.

Contribution

It presents three new direct mappings from RDF to property graphs, with two ensuring semantics and information preservation, providing a formal foundation for interoperability.

Findings

Two mappings preserve semantics and information.

Property graph model subsumes RDF data capacity.

Formal mappings enable interoperability between models.

Abstract

RDF triplestores and property graph databases are two approaches for data management which are based on modeling, storing, and querying graph-like data. In spite of such common principles, they present special features that complicate the task of database interoperability. While there exist some methods to transform RDF graphs into property graphs, and vice versa, they lack compatibility and a solid formal foundation. This paper presents three direct mappings (schema-dependent and schema-independent) for transforming an RDF database into a property graph database, including data and schema. We show that two of the proposed mappings satisfy the properties of semantics preservation and information preservation. The existence of both mappings allows us to conclude that the property graph data model subsumes the information capacity of the RDF data model.