Re: About computer-optimized RDF format.

On 23 Jul 2008, at 10:07, Olivier Rossel wrote:

> I was wondering how to improve the loading time of RDF files in
> semantic web frameworks.
> And then came a question: is RDF efficient to load?
> The obvious answer is no.

I also suspect that this is somewhat overstated. I mean, it's  
certainly my intuition but you can get good results with effort, it  
would seem.

> Making it readable for humans makes it definitely slower to load in  
> programs.
> So I came to another question:
> Is there a computer-optimized format for RDF?
> Something that would make it load much faster.
> For example by replacing URIs' string by integers, plus a lookup table
> for correspondance.

Try n-triples first.

Then try gzipping it ;)

> A nice side effect would be that big RDF would be more compact to  
> publish
>
> Are there any studies about improving the format from a
> parsing/loading/zipping perspective?

Look at all the binary xml stuff. Last I looked the general sentiment  
wasn't too favorable over gzipping form a pure performance  
perspective (though to be really good, i guess you need to not have  
an intermediate full unzip but feed the characters direct).

Cheers,
Bijan.