RDFSuite: Managing Voluminous RDF Description Bases

Dear all,
we would like to announce RDFSuite, a set of tools for parsing, storing 
and querying RDF metadata.

You can find our paper at:
HTML:  http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/RDF/RSSDB/index.html (looks
better in PCs with symbol fonts)
PDF:   http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/RDF/RSSDB/rdfsuite.pdf
PS:    http://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/isst/RDF/RSSDB/rdfsuite.ps
A short abstract follows.

We really invite interested readers to send us their comments
and/or suggestions.

Best regards
Greg Karvounarakis

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The RDFSuite: Managing Voluminous RDF Description Bases

Metadata are widely used in order to fully exploit information resources
available on corporate intranets or the Internet. The Resource Description 
Framework (RDF) aims at facilitating the creation and exchange of metadata
as any other Web data. The growing number of available information
resources and the proliferation of description services in various user
communities, lead nowadays to large volumes of RDF metadata. Managing such
RDF resource descriptions and schemas with existing low-level APIs and
file-based implementations does not ensure fast deployment and easy
maintenance of real-scale RDF applications. In this paper, we advocate the
use of database technology to support declarative access, as well as, logical 
and physical independence for voluminous RDF description bases.

We present RDFSuite, a suite of tools for RDF validation, storage and
querying. Specifically, we introduce a formal data model for RDF 
description bases created using multiple schemas. Compared to the current
status of the W3C standard, our model relies on a complete set of
validation constraints for the core RDF/S (without reification) and
provides a richer type system including several basic types as well as
union types. Next, we present the design of a persistent RDF Store (RSSDB)
for loading resource descriptions in an object-relational DBMS by
exploring the available RDF schema knowledge. Our approach preserves the
flexibility of RDF in refining schemas and/or enriching descriptions at
any time, whilst it ensures good performance for storing and querying
voluminous RDF descriptions. Last, we briefly present RQL, a declarative
language for querying both RDF descriptions and schemas, and sketch query 
evaluation on top of RSSDB.

Received on Monday, 8 January 2001 08:35:25 UTC