Carlos Buil-Aranda

Semantics and optimization of the SPARQL 1.1 federation extension

The W3C SPARQL working group is defining the new SPARQL 1.1 query language. The current working draft of SPARQL 1.1 focuses mainly on the description of the language. In this paper, we provide a formalization of the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL 1.1 federation extension, an important fragment of the language that has not yet received much attention. Besides, we propose optimization techniques for this fragment, provide an implementation of the fragment including these techniques, and carry out a series of experiments that show that our optimization procedures significantly speed up the query evaluation process.

Federating queries in SPARQL 1.1: Syntax, semantics and evaluation

Given the sustained growth that we are experiencing in the number of SPARQL endpoints available, the need to be able to send federated SPARQL queries across these has also grown. To address this use case, the W3C SPARQL working group is defining a federation extension for SPARQL 1.1 which allows for combining graph patterns that can be evaluated over several endpoints within a single query. In this paper, we describe the syntax of that extension and formalize its semantics. Additionally, we describe how a query evaluation system can be implemented for that federation extension, describing some static optimization techniques and reusing a query engine used for data-intensive science, so as to deal with large amounts of intermediate and final results. Finally we carry out a series of experiments that show that our optimizations speed up the federated query evaluation process.

Benchmarking federated SPARQL query engines: are existing testbeds enough?

Testbeds proposed so far to evaluate, compare, and eventually improve SPARQL query federation systems have still some limitations. Some variables and configurations that may have an impact on the behavior of these systems (e.g., network latency, data partitioning and query properties) are not sufficiently defined; this affects the results and repeatability of independent evaluation studies, and hence the insights that can be obtained from them. In this paper we evaluate FedBench, the most comprehensive testbed up to now, and empirically probe the need of considering additional dimensions and variables. The evaluation has been conducted on three SPARQL query federation systems, and the analysis of these results has allowed to uncover properties of these systems that would normally be hidden with the original testbeds.

Strategies for Executing Federated Queries in SPARQL1.1

A common way for exposing RDF data on the Web is by means of SPARQL endpoints which allow end users and applications to query just the RDF data they want. However, servers hosting SPARQL endpoints often restrict access to the data by limiting the amount of results returned per query or the amount of queries per time that a client may issue. As this may affect query completeness when using SPARQL1.1s federated query extension, we analysed different strategies to implement federated queries with the goal to circumvent endpoint limits. We show that some seemingly intuitive methods for decomposing federated queries provide unsound results in the general case, and provide fixes or discuss under which restrictions these recipes are still applicable. Finally, we evaluate the proposed strategies for checking their feasibility in practice.

SPARQLES: Monitoring public SPARQL endpoints

Fujitsu Laboratories Limited CONICYT/FONDECYT Project 3130617 FONDECYT Project 11140900 DGIP Project 116.24.1 Millennium Nucleus Center for Semantic Web Research NC120004

Open Standards for Service-Based Database Access and Integration

The Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group, working within the Open Grid Forum (OGF), has developed a set of data access and integration standards for distributed environments. These standards provide a set of uniform web service-based interfaces for data access. A core specification, WS-DAI, exposes and, in part, manages data resources exposed by DAIS-based services. The WS-DAI document defines a core set of access patterns, messages and properties that form a collection of generic high-level data access interfaces. WS-DAI is then extended by other specifications that specialize access for specific types of data. For example, WS-DAIR extends the WS-DAI specification with interfaces targeting relational data. Similar extensions exist for RDF and XML data. This chapter presents an overview of the specifications, the motivation for defining them and their relationships with other OGF and non-OGF standards. Current implementations of the specifications are described in addition to some existing and potential applications to highlight how this work can benefit web service-based architectures used in Grid and Cloud computing.The Database Access and Integration Services (DAIS) Working Group, working within the Open Grid Forum (OGF), has developed a set of data access and integration standards for distributed environments. These standards provide a set of uniform web service-based interfaces for data access. A core specification, WS-DAI, exposes and, in part, manages data resources exposed by DAIS-based services. The WS-DAI document defines a core set of access patterns, messages and properties that form a collection of generic high-level data access interfaces. WS-DAI is then extended by other specifications that specialize access for specific types of data. For example, WS-DAIR extends the WS-DAI specification with interfaces targeting relational data. Similar extensions exist for RDF and XML data. This chapter presents an overview of the specifications, the motivation for defining them and their relationships with other OGF and non-OGF standards. Current implementations of the specifications are described in addition to some existing and potential applications to highlight how this work can benefit web service-based architectures used in Grid and Cloud computing.

Robust Service-Based Semantic Querying to Distributed Heterogeneous Databases

The amount of semantic data on the Web has increased exponentially in the last years. One of the main reasons for this is the use of RDB2RDF systems, which generate RDF data from relational databases. Most of the work on these systems has focused on increasing the expressivity of query languages, analyzing their coverage over databases and generating sound, complete and efficient query plans. However, there are still important problems associated to them, especially in terms of robustness and in the handling of data distribution. In this paper we describe how we have integrated one RDB2RDF system (ODEMapster) with OGSA-DAI in order to overcome these problems.