News
New (2006/08/13) We released Cross 0.2. The conversion model has deeply changed, and so has the implementation.
(2006/01/25) You can now browse the darcs repository, and even subscribe to its RSS stream.
(2005/10/18) Cross 0.1b is online. We have tested the result with Pellet and RacerPro. Not fully satisfying, due to lack of full support of OWL-DL for the latter, and bugs (?) for the former, but encouraging :-).
(2005/09/01) Cross 0.1a is online. Note that it is still alpha...
About Cross
Cross is a wrapper allowing to view a relational database as OWL statements. The schema is viewed as a set of classes an properties representing the tables, columns and foreign keys; the data is viewed as a set of individuals related with one another by object properties.
Unlike other approaches like D2R, Cross uses a fixed set of rules to map relational structures to OWL ones. Customization is possible, however, by adding statements to the generated ones. This approach is expected to be easier, and just as flexible - provided that the fixed rules are general enough.
Cross is still work in progress. The set of mapping rules still has to be experimentally validated. A prototype is being developped for this purpose.
Cross is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Why Cross?
Cross formerly stood for “Converting Relational databases to OWL, Schemas and rowS”. Since this acronym is quite far-fetched and does not accurately describe what Cross is (a wrapper rather than a converter), we don't really use it anymore. So Cross just stands for Cross. You can see it as a mean of crossing the Rubicon from legacy relational data to interoperable OWL ontologies...
Download
The current prototype is implemented in Python. It works only with ODBC databases, and
provides an HTTP or STRAP access to the OWL view. See
the example directory in the source archive.