Which are the popular tools that could be recommended to migrate data from Excel SS to RDF/OWL. I am aware about google-refine but I was wondering if there are other alternatives used in practice.
Here are two free systems that map spreadsheets to RDF. Both require you to define a schema to support the mapping. While they only work for basic, regular tables, the schemas are flexibvle and allow one to do much more than assume that each row represents the literal attribute values of a single RDF or OWL instance.
- Han, L., Finin, T., Parr, C., Sachs, J., Joshi, A.: RDF123: from Spreadsheets to RDF. In: Seventh International Semantic Web Conference, Springer (2008). software.
- Langegger, A., Wob, W.: Xlwrap - querying and integrating arbitrary spreadsheets with SPARQL. In: Eigth International Semantic Web Conference, Springer (2009). software.
We have a research project that is exploring the problem of doing this without the requirement of starting with a schema by infering the classes, properties, and relations that the table encodes. In addition, we try to map strings that represent entities (e.g., "Barack Obama"), values (e.g., dates) and other types of objects to instances in a reference linked data collection. For a recent papers on this research, see:
- Zareen Syed, Tim Finin, Varish Mulwad and Anupam Joshi, Exploiting a Web of Semantic Data for Interpreting Tables, Proceedings of the Second Web Science Conference, April 2010.
- Varish Mulwad, Tim Finin, Zareen Syed and Anupam Joshi, Using linked data to interpret tables, Proceedings of the the First International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data, held in conjunction with the Ninth International Semantic Web Conference, Shanghai, November 2010.
My company, Cambridge Semantics offers a software product that does this and more. It's called Anzo for Excel, and you can learn more about it and see a few demos on the Web site.
There are several other commercial and open-source tools out there that will convert spreadsheets to RDF, but almost all of them will only work on plain, tabular spreadsheets (basically glorified CSV/TSV data). (Some of these tools are listed on this ESW wiki page about RDF converters.
If you need to convert spreadsheets with more complex layouts, formulas, macros, protection, etc., then Anzo for Excel may help you out. If you are working with spreadsheets that change regularly and want to be able to update information rather than just do one-time conversions, then Anzo for Excel may help you out. And if you're interested in doing more than just generating RDF/OWL -- such as doing distributed data collection or using Excel to collaborate over your data or visualizing the (RDF) data from an Excel spreadsheet in a simple-to-use faceted browser, than Anzo for Excel may be for you.
Lee
TopBraid Suite has a facility for round-trip editing of Excel spreadsheets with Semantic Tables. Excel tables are parsed into RDF triples where the data can be merged, transformed and saved in other formats using SPARQL Rules, SPARQLMotion, RDFS/OWL inferences, etc. Excel files can be imported, modified as desired, merged with other data and otherwise processed, and written back to the spreadsheet.
Collaborative editing of Excel, or other RDF data is supported through TopBraid Ensemble with a TopBraid Live server, which can be tested and demonstrated on a desktop using TopBraid Composer-Maestro Edition.