ABSTRACT
The Semantic Web is the initiative of the W3C to make information on the Web readable not only by humans but also by machines. RDF is the data model for Semantic Web data, and SPARQL is the standard query language for this data model. In the last ten years, we have witnessed a constant growth in the amount of RDF data available on the Web, which have motivated the theoretical study of some fundamental aspects of SPARQL and the development of efficient mechanisms for implementing this query language.
Some of the distinctive features of RDF have made the study and implementation of SPARQL challenging. First, as opposed to usual database applications, the semantics of RDF is open world, making RDF databases inherently incomplete. Thus, one usually obtains partial answers when querying RDF with SPARQL, and the possibility of adding optional information if present is a crucial feature of SPARQL. Second, RDF databases have a graph structure and are interlinked, thus making graph navigational capabilities a necessary component of SPARQL. Last, but not least, SPARQL has to work at Web scale!
RDF and SPARQL have attracted interest from the database community. However, we think that this community has much more to say about these technologies, and, in particular, about the fundamental database problems that need to be solved in order to provide solid foundations for the development of these technologies. In this paper, we survey some of the main results about the theory of RDF and SPARQL putting emphasis on some research opportunities for the database community.
Supplemental Material
- S. Abiteboul and V. Vianu. Queries and computation on the Web. Theor. Comput. Sci., 239(2):231--255, 2000. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- F. Alkhateeb, J.-F. Baget, and J. Euzenat. Extending SPARQL with regular expression patterns (for querying RDF). J. Web Sem., 7(2):57--73, 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Angles and C. Gutierrez. The expressive power of SPARQL. In ISWC, pages 114--129, 2008. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Angles and C. Gutiérrez. Survey of graph database models. ACM Comput. Surv., 40(1), 2008. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- P. Barceló, C. A. Hurtado, L. Libkin, and P. T. Wood. Expressive languages for path queries over graph-structured data. In PODS, pages 3--14, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Berners-Lee. Design issues: Linked Data. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html, July 2006.Google Scholar
- T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, and L. Masinter. Uniform resource identifier (URI): Generic syntax. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt, 2005.Google Scholar
- C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee. Linked data - the story so far. Int. J. Semantic Web Inf. Syst., 5(3):1--22, 2009.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Buil-Aranda, M. Arenas, and O. Corcho. Semantics and optimization of the SPARQL 1.1 federation extension. In ESWC, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D. Calvanese, G. De Giacomo, M. Lenzerini, and M. Y. Vardi. Containment of conjunctive regular path queries with inverse. In KR, 2000.Google Scholar
- J. Clark and S. DeRose. XML path language (XPath). W3C recommendation. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath, November 2008.Google Scholar
- R.V. Guha D. Brickley. RDF vocabulary description language 1.0: RDF schema, W3C recommendation, February 2004.Google Scholar
- DBpedia. http://dbpedia.org/.Google Scholar
- A. Deutsch and V. Tannen. Optimization properties for classes of conjunctive regular path queries. In DBPL, pages 21--39, 2001. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Furche, B. Linse, F. Bry, D. Plexousakis, and G. Gottlob. RDF querying: Language constructs and evaluation methods compared. In Reasoning Web, pages 1--52, 2006.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- M. R. Garey and David S. Johnson. Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. W. H. Freeman, 1979. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- B. Glimm and M. Krötzsch. SPARQL beyond subgraph matching. In ISWC, pages 241--256, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. Gutierrez, C. A. Hurtado, A. O. Mendelzon, and J. Pérez. Foundations of semantic web databases. J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 77(3):520--541, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. Harris and A. Seaborne. SPARQL 1.1 query language. W3C working draft. http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/, October 2010.Google Scholar
- O. Hartig and A. Langegger. A database perspective on consuming Linked Data on the Web. Datenbank-Spektrum, 10(2):57--66, 2010.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- O. Hartig, J. Sequeda, J. Taylor, and P. Sinclair. How to consume Linked Data on the Web: tutorial description. In WWW, pages 1347--1348, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Pat Hayes. RDF semantics, W3C Recommendation, February 2004.Google Scholar
- T. Heath and C. Bizer. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D2R DBLP Bibliography Database hosted at L3S Research Center. http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/.Google Scholar
- I. Kollia, B. Glimm, and I. Horrocks. SPARQL query answering over OWL ontologies. In ESWC, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- F. Manola and E. Miller. RDF primer, W3C recommendation, February 2004.Google Scholar
- A. O. Mendelzon and T. Milo. Formal models of Web queries. Inf. Syst., 23(8):615--637, 1998. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. O. Mendelzon and P. T. Wood. Finding regular simple paths in graph databases. In VLDB, pages 185--193, 1989. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. Munoz, J. Pérez, and C. Gutiérrez. Minimal deductive systems for RDF. In ESWC, pages 53--67, 2007. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. T. Özsu and P. Valduriez. Principles of Distributed Database Systems, Third Edition. Prentice-Hall, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- P. F. Patel-Schneider, P. Hayes, and I. Horrocks. OWL semantics and abstract syntax. W3C recommendation. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/, February 2004.Google Scholar
- J. Pérez, M. Arenas, and C. Gutierrez. Semantics and complexity of SPARQL. In ISWC, pages 30--43, 2006. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. Pérez, M. Arenas, and C. Gutierrez. Semantics and complexity of SPARQL. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 34(3), 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. Pérez, M. Arenas, and C. Gutierrez. nSPARQL: A navigational language for RDF. J. Web Sem., 8(4):255--270, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Polleres. SPARQL1.1: New features and friends (OWL2, RIF). In Rules and Reasoning, pages 23--26, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Axel Polleres. From SPARQL to rules (and back). In Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), pages 787--796, 2007. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- E. Prud-hommeaux and A. Seaborne. SPARQL query language for RDF. W3C recommendation. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/, January 2008.Google Scholar
- M. Schmidt, M. Meier, and G. Lausen. Foundations of SPARQL query optimization. In ICDT, pages 4--33, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- E. Sirin and B. Parsia. SPARQL-DL: SPARQL query for OWL-DL. In OWLED, 2007.Google Scholar
- M. Y. Vardi. The complexity of relational query languages (extended abstract). In STOC, pages 137--146, 1982. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- V. Vianu. A Web odyssey: from Codd to XML. SIGMOD Record, 32(2):68--77, 2003. Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
Querying semantic web data with SPARQL
Recommendations
RDF, Jena, SparQL and the 'Semantic Web'
SIGUCCS '09: Proceedings of the 37th annual ACM SIGUCCS fall conference: communication and collaborationThe Resource Description Format (RDF) is used to represent information modeled as a "graph": a set of individual objects, along with a set of connections among those objects. In that role, RDF is one of the pillars of the so-called Semantic Web. This ...
Using SPARQL to query bioportal ontologies and metadata
ISWC'12: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on The Semantic Web - Volume Part IIBioPortal is a repository of biomedical ontologies--the largest such repository, with more than 300 ontologies to date. This set includes ontologies that were developed in OWL, OBO and other languages, as well as a large number of medical terminologies ...
Using the relation ontology Metarel for modelling Linked Data as multi-digraphs
Linked Data for Health Care and the Life SciencesThe Semantic Web standards OWL and RDF are often used to represent biomedical information as Linked Data; however, the OWL/RDF syntax, which combines both, was never optimised for querying. By combining two formal paradigms for modelling Linked Data, ...






Comments