Michel Scholl

RQL: a declarative query language for RDF

Real-scale Semantic Web applications, such as Knowledge Portals and E-Marketplaces, require the management of large volumes of metadata, i.e., information describing the available Web content and services. Better knowledge about their meaning, usage, accessibility or quality will considerably facilitate an automated processing of Web resources. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) enables the creation and exchange of metadata as normal Web data. Although voluminous RDF descriptions are already appearing, sufficiently expressive declarative languages for querying both RDF descriptions and schemas are still missing. In this paper, we propose a new RDF query language called RQL. It is a typed functional language (a la OQL) and relies on a formal model for directed labeled graphs permitting the interpretation of superimposed resource descriptions by means of one or more RDF schemas. RQL adapts the functionality of semistructured/XML query languages to the peculiarities of RDF but, foremost, it enables to uniformly query both resource descriptions and schemas. We illustrate the RQL syntax, semantics and typing system by means of a set of example queries and report on the performance of our persistent RDF Store employed by the RQL interpreter.

From structured documents to novel query facilities

Structured documents (e.g., SGML) can benefit a lot from database support and more specifically from object-oriented database (OODB) management systems. This paper describes a natural mapping from SGML documents into OODBs and a formal extension of two OODB query languages (one SQL-like and the other calculus) in order to deal with SGML document retrieval. Although motivated by structured documents, the extensions of query languages that we present are general and useful for a variety of other OODB applications. A key element is the introduction of paths as first class citizens. The new features allow to query data (and to some extent schema) without exact knowledge of the schema in a simple and homogeneous fashion.

Ontology-Based Integration of XML Web Resources

This paper deals with some modeling aspects that have to be addressed in the context of the integration of heterogeneous and autonomous XML resources. We propose an integration system, but the emphasis of this paper is neither on its algorithmic aspects nor on its technical details. Instead, we focus on the significance of offering appropriate high-level primitives and mechanisms for representing the semantics of XML data. We posit that support for such primitives and mechanisms is a pre-requisite for realizingthe goals of the semantic Web.

On labeling schemes for the semantic web

This paper focuses on the optimization of the navigation through voluminous subsumption hierarchies of topics employed by Portal Catalogs like Netscape Open Directory (ODP). We advocate for the use of labeling schemes for modeling these hierarchies in order to efficiently answer queries such as subsumption check, descendants, ancestors or nearest common ancestor, which usually require costly transitive closure computations. We first give a qualitative comparison of three main families of schemes, namely bit vector, prefix and interval based schemes. We then show that two labeling schemes are good candidates for an efficient implementation of label querying using standard relational DBMS, namely, the Dewey Prefix scheme [6] and an Interval scheme by Agrawal, Borgida and Jagadish [1]. We compare their storage and query evaluation performance for the 16 ODP hierarchies using the PostgreSQL engine.

Thematic map modeling

We study here how to provide the designer of geographic databases with a database query language extensible and customizable. The model presented here is a first step toward a high level spatial query language adapted to the manipulation of thematic maps.

Gram: a graph data model and query languages

We present a model for data organized as graphs. Regular expressions over the types of the node and edge labels are used to qualify connected subgraphs. An algebraic language based on these regular expressions and supporting a restricted form of recursion is introduced. A natural application of this model and its query language is hypertext querying.

Querying the Semantic Web with RQL

Real-scale Semantic Web applications, such as Knowledge Portals and E-Marketplaces, require the management of voluminous repositories of resource metadata. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) enables the creation and exchange of metadata as any other Web data. Although large volumes of RDF descriptions are already appearing, sufficiently expressive declarative query languages for RDF are still missing. We propose RQL, a new query language adapting the functionality of semistructured or XML query languages to the peculiarities of RDF but also extending this functionality in order to uniformly query both RDF descriptions and schemas. RQL is a typed language, following a functional approach a la OQL and relies on a formal graph model that permits the interpretation of superimposed resource descriptions created using one or more RDF schemas. We illustrate the syntax, semantics and type system of RQL and report on the performance of RSSDB, our persistent RDF Store, for storing and querying voluminous RDF metadata.

Multi-Scale Partitions: Application to Spatial and Statistical Databases

We study the impact of scale on data representation from both the modelling and querying points of view. While our starting point was geographical applications, statistical databases also address this problem of data representation at various levels of abstraction. From these requirements, we propose a model which allows: (i) database querying without exact knowledge of the data abstraction level, (ii) the computation of multiple representations of data, one per abstraction level, and (iii) its application to the computation of statistical summaries. The model has been partially implemented with the DBMS O2 by means of tree-structured domains: we give some examples which illustrate the above features.

Querying XML Sources Using an Ontology-Based Mediator

In this paper we propose a mediator architecture for the querying and integration of Web-accessible XML data sources. Our contributions are (i) the definition of a simple but expressive mapping language, following the local as view approach and describing XML resources as local views of some global schema, and (ii) efficient algorithms for rewriting user queries according to existing source descriptions. The approach has been validated by the STYX prototype.

Optimizing Taxonomic Semantic Web Queries using Labeling Schemes

Abstract This paper focuses on the optimization of the navigation through voluminous subsumption hierarchies of topics employed by portal catalogs like Netscape Open Directory (ODP). We advocate for the use of labeling schemes for modeling these hierarchies in order to efficiently answer queries such as subsumption check, descendants, ancestors or nearest common ancestor, which usually require costly transitive closure computations. We first give a qualitative comparison of three main families of schemes, namely bit vector, prefix and interval based schemes. We then show that two labeling schemes are good candidates for an efficient implementation of label querying using standard relational DBMS, namely the Dewey prefix scheme and an interval scheme by Agrawal et al. We compare their storage and query evaluation performance for the 16 ODP hierarchies using the PostgreSQL engine.