Optimizing Keyword Search Over Federated RDF Systems

Abstract

The issue of keyword search in federated resource description framework(RDF) systems is revisited in this paper. Numerous independent SPARQL endpoints that solely offer SPARQL query interfaces make up a federated RDF system. Others find it challenging to remotely build up the global inverted indices over the full RDF network by downloading the dataset at various SPARQL endpoints. This poses a challenge for existing keyword search approaches. In this paper, we propose a keyword search approach for federated RDF systems without building up global inverted indices on the entire RDF graph. We build an offline schema graph for the federated RDF system. During query evaluation, the full-text search interfaces provided by existing SPARQL endpoints were used to map keywords to vertices in the schema graph. Subsequently, the schema graph was explored to construct SPARQL queries from the keywords. The constructed queries were evaluated over the underlying federated RDF systems. Some cost models were proposed to measure keyword mapping and query construction. On the other hand, to further improve the efficiency, a multiple query optimization strategy was designed to rewrite the queries and share the common computation during evaluation. Extensive experiments on real RDF datasets show that the proposed techniques are effective.