Temporal Data Representation and Querying Based on RDF

Fu Zhang,Ke Wang,Zhiyin Li,Jingwei Cheng

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2924550

Abstract

With the explosive growth of temporal data, how to query and manage temporal data has become an important research issue. Resource description framework (RDF), as the standard data and knowledge description language of the semantic web, has been widely used to represent various domain data. Aiming at the representation and querying of temporal data, this paper proposes a temporal data representation model based on RDF and its corresponding querying method. First, a representation model called RDFt is proposed, which can represent temporal data with both the time information and the update count information, and the syntax and semantics of the RDFt model are given. Then, we propose a query language called SPARQL[t] for RDFt, and we give the query syntax and operations of SPARQL[t] in detail. In addition, a querying transformation algorithm from SPARQL[t] to SPARQL is proposed, in order to achieve compatibility with the existing RDF query engines. Finally, we implemented a prototype system that can support RDFt temporal data representation and querying, and the case studies and experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Highlights

In recent years, with the development of the Semantic Web and knowledge engineering, Resource Description Framework (RDF) [1], which has formed a more systematic and comprehensive technical architecture in data and knowledge representation and processing, has become one of the main forms for representing knowledge
There are three main types of temporal data models in the existing work, the first one is temporal data models based on the version control which is used to annotate the state of an RDF triple with the change of time; the second one is temporal data model based on the different extension forms of RDF triple (e.g., RDF quad-tuple syntax); the third one is temporal data model based on the original form of RDF triple by adding timestamp information after the predicate or the whole triple
In this paper we propose a new temporal RDF data model called RDFt, which can represent the temporal data with both the time information and the update count information, and we present the syntax and semantics of RDFt model in detail and provide the example to well explain the model; (ii) Regarding to the query of temporal data, the existing query languages cannot realize the query for our proposed RDFt data model

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the development of the Semantic Web and knowledge engineering, Resource Description Framework (RDF) [1], which has formed a more systematic and comprehensive technical architecture in data and knowledge representation and processing, has become one of the main forms for representing knowledge. Based on the observations above, in order to manage more variety of temporal information, in this paper we propose a new temporal data representation model called RDFt and its corresponding query language SPARQL[t]. We propose a new temporal data representation model RDFt, including: (i) we extend the RDF data model by adding time information and update count information to the predicate part of a triple, and we define the syntax and semantics of RDFt temporal data model; (ii) we provide several examples to well explain the model.

PRELIMINARIES

PROTOTYPE AND EXPERIMENTS

RELATED WORK

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK