Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Blank Nodes

Abstract

In this paper we thoroughly cover the issue of nodes, which have been defined in RDF as 'existential variables'. We first introduce the theoretical precedent for existential nodes from first order logic and incomplete information in database theory. We then cover the different (and sometimes incompatible) treatment of nodes across the W3C stack of RDF-related standards. We present an empirical survey of the nodes present in a large sample of RDF data published on the Web (the BTC-2012 dataset), where we find that 25.7% of unique RDF terms are nodes, that 44.9% of documents and 66.2% of domains featured use of at least one node, and that aside from one Linked Data domain whose RDF data contains many blank node cycles, the vast majority of nodes form tree structures that are efficient to compute simple entailment over. With respect to the RDF-merge of the full data, we show that 6.1% of blank-nodes are redundant under simple entailment. The vast majority of non-lean cases are isomorphisms resulting from multiple nodes with no discriminating information being given within an RDF document or documents being duplicated in multiple Web locations. Although simple entailment is NP-complete and leanness-checking is coNP-complete, in computing this latter result, we demonstrate that in practice, real-world RDF graphs are sufficiently rich in ground information for problematic cases to be avoided by non-naive algorithms.