Lifting spreadsheets made easy: combining power and magic in Sheet2RDF

In this paper, we present an update to Sheet2RDF, a system for lifting tabular data to RDF. Based on an updated comparison with related work, we highlight Sheet2RDF’s combination of flexibility and usability, enabled by a powerful transformation language, now being coupled with a richer graphical wizard and heuristics/conventions that simplify the specification of the transformation. We then discuss the enhancements to Sheet2RDF: some of them, related to the expressiveness of the transformation, are motivated by new use cases, such as dataset update, transformation of relational databases, and processing multiple sheets (or tables). Other improvements are more related to usability and improving Sheet2RDF’s combined approach; we highlight in this category the substantial improvements to the wizard: an explicit model allows saving, sharing, and reloading of wizard state, while scoped code fragments finally allow for combining the wizard and code editing, sidestepping the non-invertibility of the transformation code generation from the wizard through synced code fragments.