Flexible Integration and Efficient Analysis of Multidimensional Datasets from the Web

If numeric data from the Web are brought together, natural scientists can compare climate measurements with estimations, financial analysts can evaluate companies based on balance sheets and daily stock market values, and citizens can explore the GDP per capita from several data sources. However, heterogeneities and size of data remain a problem. This work presents methods to query a uniform view - the Global Cube - of available datasets from the Web and builds on Linked Data query approaches

The {RDF}-3X Engine for Scalable Management of {RDF} Data

RDF is a data model for schema-free structured information that is gaining momentum in the context of Semantic-Web data, life sciences, and also Web 2.0 platforms. The ``pay-as-you-go'' nature of RDF and the flexible pattern-matching capabilities of its query language SPARQL entail efficiency and scalability challenges for complex queries including long join paths. This paper presents the RDF-3X engine, an implementation of SPARQL that achieves excellent performance by pursuing a RISC-style architecture with streamlined indexing and query processing. The physical design is identical for all RDF-3X databases regardless of their workloads, and completely eliminates the need for index tuning by exhaustive indexes for all permutations of subject-property-object triples and their binary and unary projections. These indexes are highly compressed, and the query processor can aggressively leverage fast merge joins with excellent performance of processor caches. The query optimizer is able to choose optimal join orders even for complex queries, with a cost model that includes statistical synopses for entire join paths. Although RDF-3X is optimized for queries, it also provides good support for efficient online updates by means of a staging architecture: direct updates to the main database indexes are deferred, and instead applied to compact differential indexes which are later merged into the main indexes in a batched manner. Experimental studies with several large-scale datasets with more than 50 million RDF triples and benchmark queries that include pattern matching, manyway star-joins, and long path-joins demonstrate that RDF-3X can outperform the previously best alternatives by one or two orders of magnitude

QB4OLAP : Enabling business intelligence over semantic web data

Premio Primer puesto otorgado por la Academia Nacional de Ingeniería.The World-Wide Web was initially conceived as a repository of information tailored for human consumption. In the last decade, the idea of transforming the web into a machine-understandable web of data, has gained momentum. To this end, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains a set of standards, referred to as the Semantic Web (SW), which allow to openly share data and metadata. Among these is the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which represents data as graphs, RDF-S and OWL to describe the data structure via ontologies or vocabularies, and SPARQL, the RDF query language. On top of the RDF data model, standards and recommendations can be built to represent data that adheres to other models. The multidimensional (MD) model views data in an n-dimensional space, usually called a data cube, composed of dimensions and facts. The former reflect the perspectives from which data are viewed, and the latter correspond to points in this space, associated with (usually) quantitative data (also known as measures). Facts can be aggregated, disaggregated, and filtered using the dimensions. This process is called Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Despite the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary (QB) is the W3C standard to represent statistical data, which resembles MD data, it does not include key features needed for OLAP analysis, like dimension hierarchies, dimension level attributes, and aggregate functions. To enable this kind of analysis over SW data cubes, in this thesis we propose the QB4 OLAP vocabulary, an extension of QB. A problem remains, however: writing efficient analytical queries over SW data cubes requires a deep knowledge of RDF and SPARQL, unlikely to be found in typical OLAP users. We address this problem in this thesis. Our approach is based on allowing analytical users to write queries using what they know best: OLAP operations over data cubes, without dealing with SW technicalities. For this, we devised CQL, a simple, high-level query language over data cubes. Then we make use of the structural metadata provided by QB4 OLAP to translate CQL queries into SPARQL ones. We adapt general-purpose SPARQL query optimization techniques, and propose query improvement strategies to produce efficient SPARQL queries. We evaluate our implementation tailoring the well known Star-Schema benchmark, which allows us to compare our proposal against existing ones in a fair way. We show that our approach outperforms other ones. Finally, as another result, our experiments allow us to study which combinations of improvement strategies fits better to an analytical scenario.La World-Wide Web fue concebida como un repositorio de informa- ción a ser procesada y consumida por humanos. Pero en la última década ha ganado impulso la idea de transformar a la Web en una gran base de datos procesables por máquinas. Con este fin, el World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ha establecido una serie de estándares también conocidos como estándares para la Web Semántica (WS), los cuales permiten compartir datos y metadatos en formatos abiertos. Entre estos estándares se destacan: el Resource Description Framework (RDF), un modelo de datos basado en grafos para representar datos y relaciones entre ellos, RDF-S y OWL que permiten describir la estructura y el significado de los datos por medio de ontologías o vocabu- larios, y el lenguaje de consultas SPARQL. Estos estándares pueden ser utilizados para construir representaciones de otros modelos de datos, por ejemplo datos tabulares o datos relacionales. El modelo de datos multidimensional (MD) representa a los datos dentro de un espacio n-dimensional, usualmente denominado cubo de datos, que se compone de dimensiones y hechos. Las primeras reflejan las perspectivas desde las cuales interesa analizar los datos, mientras que las segundas corresponden a puntos en este espacio n- dimensional, a los cuales se asocian valores usualmente numéricos, conocidos como medidas. Los hechos pueden ser agregados y resumidos, desagregados, y filtrados utilizando las dimensiones. Este pro- ceso es conocido como Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Pese a que la W3C ha establecido un estándar que puede ser utilizado para publicación de datos multidimensionales, conocido como el RDF Data Cube Vocabulary (QB), éste no incluye algunos aspectos del modelo MD que son imprescindibles para realizar análisis tipo OLAP como son las jerarquías de dimensión, los atributos en los niveles de dimensión, y las funciones de agregaciónpara resumir valores de medidas. Para permitir este tipo de análisis sobre cubos en la SW, en esta tesis se propone un vocabulario que extiende el vocabulario QB denominado QB4OLAP. Sin embargo, para realizar análisis tipo OLAP en forma eficiente sobre cubos QB4OLAP es necesario un conocimiento profundo de RDF y SPARQL, los cuales distan de ser populares entre los usuarios OLAP típicos. Esta tesis también aborda este problema. Nuestro enfoque consiste en brindar un conjunto de operaciones clásicas para los usuarios OLAP, y luego realizar la traducción en forma automática de estas operaciones en consultas SPARQL. Comenzamos definiendo un lenguaje de consultas para cubos en alto nivel: Cube Query Language (CQL), y luego explotamos la metadata representada mediante QB4OLAP para realizar la traducción a SPARQL. Asimismo, mejoramos el rendimiento de las consultas obtenidas, adaptando y aplicando técnicas existentes de optimización de consultas SPARQL. Para evaluar nuestra propuesta adaptamos a los estándares de la SW el Star Schema benchmark, el cual es el estándar para la evaluación de sistemas tipo OLAP. Esto permite comparar nuestro enfoque con otras propuestas existentes, asi como evaluar el impacto de nuestras estrategias de mejoras de consultas SPARQL. De esta comparación podemos concluir que nuestro enfoque supera a otras propuestas existentes, y que nuestras técnicas de mejoras logran incrementar en 10 veces el rendimiento del sistema

GUN: An Efficient Execution Strategy for Querying the Web of Data

International audienceLocal-As-View (LAV) mediators provide a uniform interface to a federation of heterogeneous data sources, attempting to execute queries against the federation. LAV mediators rely on query rewriters to translate mediator queries into equivalent queries on the federated data sources. The query rewriting problem in LAV mediators has shown to be NP-complete, and there may be an exponential number of rewritings, making unfeasible the execution or even generation of all the rewritings for some queries. The complexity of this problem can be particularly impacted when queries and data sources are described using SPARQL conjunctive queries, for which millions of rewritings could be generated. We aim at providing an efficient solution to the problem of executing LAV SPARQL query rewritings while the gathered answer is as complete as possible. We formulate the Result-Maximal k-Execution problem (ReMakE) as the problem of maximizing the query results obtained from the execution of only k rewritings. Additionally, a novel query execution strategy called GUN is proposed to solve the ReMakE problem. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that GUN outperforms traditional techniques in terms of answer completeness and execution time

RDF Analytics: Lenses over Semantic Graphs

International audienceThe development of Semantic Web (RDF) brings new requirements for data analytics tools and methods, going beyond querying to semantics-rich analytics through warehouse-style tools. In this work, we fully redesign, from the bottom up, core data analytics concepts and tools in the context of RDF data, leading to the first complete formal framework for warehouse-style RDF analytics. Notably, we define i) analytical schemas tailored to heterogeneous, semantics-rich RDF graph, ii) analytical queries which (beyond relational cubes) allow flexible querying of the data and the schema as well as powerful aggregation and iii) OLAP-style operations. Experiments on a fully-implemented platform demonstrate the practical interest of our approach

Flexible Integration and Efficient Analysis of Multidimensional Datasets from the Web

If numeric data from the Web are brought together, natural scientists can compare climate measurements with estimations, financial analysts can evaluate companies based on balance sheets and daily stock market values, and citizens can explore the GDP per capita from several data sources. However, heterogeneities and size of data remain a problem. This work presents methods to query a uniform view - the Global Cube - of available datasets from the Web and builds on Linked Data query approaches

Linked Open Data - Creating Knowledge Out of Interlinked Data: Results of the LOD2 Project

Database Management; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Information Systems and Communication Servic