Marefa: Turning Publishers Catalogs' Data Into Linked Data

This article describes how recently, many new technologies have been introduced to the web; linked data is probably the most important. Individuals and organizations started emerging and publishing their data on the web adhering to a set of best practices. This data is published mostly in English; hence, only English agents can consume it. Meanwhile, although the number of Arabic users on the web is immense, few Arabic datasets are published. Publication catalogs are one of the primary sources of Arabic data that is not being exploited. Arabic catalogs provide a significant amount of meaningful data and metadata that are commonly stored in excel sheets. In this article, an effort has been made to help publishers easily and efficiently share their catalogs' data as linked data. Marefa is the first tool implemented that automatically extracts RDF triples from Arabic catalogs, aligns them to the BIBO ontology and links them with the Arabic chapter of DBpedia. An evaluation of the framework was conducted, and some statistical measures were generated during the different phases of the extraction process.