RDF for temporal data management – a survey

Abstract

Over the years, a large amount of temporal data needs to be shared and exchanged on the Web. Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been widely accepted and has rapidly gained popularity to al RDF) model as mentioned in represent and share data in many application domains (e.g., the Data of Web, Linked Data, and Knowledge Graph). Accordingly, efficient management of temporal data based on RDF is of increasing importance. Much work has been devoted to the representation, querying, storage, and management of temporal RDF data. Therefore, to investigate and more importantly serve as helping researchers grasp the main ideas and results of temporal RDF data management, and to highlight an ongoing research on them, in this paper, we provide a full up-to-date overview of the current state of the art in temporal RDF data management, including representation, querying, storage, and other directions. In detail, regarding to the representation of temporal RDF models, we first classify the existing temporal RDF models into two main categories according to their focuses (including the new RDF extension models and the original RDF models based on timestamp). We summarize and compare each model from the perspectives of syntax, semantics, and etc. Then, we further summarize the temporal RDF querying and storage techniques in detail. Moreover, to well introduce the main idea of each approach, we use some examples to explain each approach. In addition, the directions for future research and some comparisons and analyses are discussed in our whole survey. This survey will help readers understand and catch some key techniques about the issue and also identify some future research directions.