An ontological approach for representing declarative mapping languages

Knowledge Graphs are currently created using an assortment of techniques and tools: ad hoc code in a programming language, database export scripts, OpenRefine transformations, mapping languages, etc. Focusing on the latter, the wide variety of use cases, data peculiarities, and potential uses has had a substantial impact in how mappings have been created, extended, and applied. As a result, a large number of languages and their associated tools have been created. In this paper, we present the Conceptual Mapping ontology, that is designed to represent the features and characteristics of existing declarative mapping languages to construct Knowledge Graphs. This ontology is built upon the requirements extracted from experts experience, a thorough analysis of the features and capabilities of current mapping languages presented as a comparative framework; and the languages’ limitations discussed by the community and denoted as Mapping Challenges. The ontology is evaluated to ensure that it meets these requirements and has no inconsistencies, pitfalls or modelling errors, and is publicly available online along with its documentation and related resources.