On requirements for federated data integration as a compilation process

Data integration problems are commonly viewed as interoperability issues, where the burden of reaching a common ground for exchanging data is distributed across the peers involved in the process. While apparently an effective approach towards standardization and interoperability, it poses a constraint to data providers who, for a variety of reasons, require backwards compatibility with proprietary or non-standard mechanisms. Publishing a holistic data API is one such use case, where a single peer performs most of the integration work in a many-to-one scenario. Incidentally, this is also the base setting of software compilers, whose operational model is comprised of phases that perform analysis, linkage and assembly of source code and generation of intermediate code. There are several analogies with a data integration process, more so with data that live in the Semantic Web, but what requirements would a data provider need to satisfy, for an integrator to be able to query and transform its data effectively, with no further enforcements on the provider? With this paper, we inquire into what practices and essential prerequisites could turn this intuition into a concrete and exploitable vision, within Linked Data and beyond

Hypermedia-based discovery for source selection using low-cost linked data interfaces

Evaluating federated Linked Data queries requires consulting multiple sources on the Web. Before a client can execute queries, it must discover data sources, and determine which ones are relevant. Federated query execution research focuses on the actual execution, while data source discovery is often marginally discussed-even though it has a strong impact on selecting sources that contribute to the query results. Therefore, the authors introduce a discovery approach for Linked Data interfaces based on hypermedia links and controls, and apply it to federated query execution with Triple Pattern Fragments. In addition, the authors identify quantitative metrics to evaluate this discovery approach. This article describes generic evaluation measures and results for their concrete approach. With low-cost data summaries as seed, interfaces to eight large real-world datasets can discover each other within 7 minutes. Hypermedia-based client-side querying shows a promising gain of up to 50% in execution time, but demands algorithms that visit a higher number of interfaces to improve result completeness

Partout: A Distributed Engine for Efficient RDF Processing

The increasing interest in Semantic Web technologies has led not only to a rapid growth of semantic data on the Web but also to an increasing number of backend applications with already more than a trillion triples in some cases. Confronted with such huge amounts of data and the future growth, existing state-of-the-art systems for storing RDF and processing SPARQL queries are no longer sufficient. In this paper, we introduce Partout, a distributed engine for efficient RDF processing in a cluster of machines. We propose an effective approach for fragmenting RDF data sets based on a query log, allocating the fragments to nodes in a cluster, and finding the optimal configuration. Partout can efficiently handle updates and its query optimizer produces efficient query execution plans for ad-hoc SPARQL queries. Our experiments show the superiority of our approach to state-of-the-art approaches for partitioning and distributed SPARQL query processing

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions