MULDER: Querying the Linked Data Web by Bridging RDF Molecule Templates

Abstract

The increasing number of RDF data sources that allow for querying Linked Data via Web services form the basis for federated SPARQL query processing. Federated SPARQL query engines provide a unified view of a federation of RDF data sources, and rely on source descriptions for selecting the data sources over which unified queries will be executed. Albeit efficient, existing federated SPARQL query engines usually ignore the meaning of data accessible from a data source, and describe sources only in terms of the vocabularies utilized in the data source. Lack of source description may conduce to the erroneous selection of data sources for a query, thus affecting the performance of query processing over the federation. We tackle the problem of federated SPARQL query processing and devise MULDER, a query engine for federations of RDF data sources. MULDER describes data sources in terms of RDF molecule templates, i.e., abstract descriptions of entities belonging to the same RDF class. Moreover, MULDER utilizes RDF molecule templates for source selection, and query decomposition and optimization. We empirically study the performance of MULDER on existing benchmarks, and compare MULDER performance with state-of-the-art federated SPARQL query engines. Experimental results suggest that RDF molecule templates empower MULDER federated query processing, and allow for the selection of RDF data sources that not only reduce execution time, but also increase answer completeness.