M. Wischenbart, S. Mitsch, E. Kapsammer, A. Kusel, S. Lechner, B. Pröll, J. Schönböck, W. Schwinger, M. Wimmer: Automatic Data Transformation: Breaching the Walled Gardens of Social Network Platforms, Vortrag: 9th Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCMM 2013), Australia, January 29 - February 1st 2013, Proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCMM 2013), ACM (2013), ISBN: 978-1-921770-28-9, pages 89 - 98 dl.acm.org
Although many social networks on the Web allow access via dedicated APIs, the extraction of instance data for further use by applications is often a tedious task. As a result, instance data transformation to Linked Data in the form of owl, as well as the integration with other data sources, are aggravated. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a model-driven approach to overcome data model heterogeneity by automatically transforming schemas and instance data from json to owl/xml, utilizing the semantic features of owl and Jena inference rules. We present a prototypical implementation on the basis of the Eclipse Modeling Framework. This implementation is applied and evaluated on data from Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Finally, we provide prospects for semantic integration and managing evolution, as well as a discussion of how to generalize our approach to other domains and transformations between arbitrary technical spaces.