Querying SAP ERP with SPARQL

Abstract

Most of the mid-size and large companies employ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage their business data and business processes. Business entities like purchase orders, equipments or customers are represented as business objects in ERP systems. Multiple business objects can span a business object graph by referencing each other. The SAP ERP system provides several interfaces to access business objects. Querying business objects with regard to their positions within a business object graph by using these existing interfaces is not an easy task. In this paper, we propose to use the RDF query language SPARQL to express queries against business object graphs. We argue that SPARQL is well suited to query business objects in ERP systems and introduce an architecture to provide a SPARQL endpoint on top of an SAP ERP system. This novel approach simplifies the retrieval of data from ERP systems and makes it available to the integration with the Semantic Web.