Handling failing RDF queries: from diagnosis to relaxation

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the development of large knowledge bases (KBs). Due to the lack of information about the content and schema semantics of KBs, users are often not able to correctly formulate KB queries that return the intended result. In this paper, we consider the problem of failing RDF queries, i.e., queries that return an empty set of answers. Query relaxation is one cooperative technique proposed to solve this problem. In the context of RDF data, several works proposed query relaxation operators and ranking models for relaxed queries. But none of them tried to find the causes of an RDF query failure given by Minimal Failing Subqueries (MFSs) as well as successful queries that have a maximal number of triple patterns named Ma$$\underline{x}$$x?imal Succeeding Subqueries (XSSs). Inspired by previous work in the context of relational databases and recommender systems, we propose two complementary approaches to fill this gap. The lattice-based approach (LBA) leverages the theoretical properties of MFSs and XSSs to efficiently explore the subquery lattice of the failing query. The matrix-based approach computes a matrix that records alternative answers to the failing query with the triple patterns they satisfy. The skyline of this matrix directly gives the XSSs of the failing query. This matrix can also be used as an index to improve the performance of LBA. The practical interest of these two approaches are shown via a set of experiments conducted on the LUBM benchmark and a comparative study with baseline and related work algorithms.