Section: New Results

Scalable and Expressive Techniques for the Semantic Web

A main scientific topic of the team is the design of expressive and efficient tools for analyzing and manipulating Semantic Web data, in particular RDF. Our 2014 results in this area follow three complementary directions.

First, we have finalized our model for RDF analytics and proposed a full framework in which 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 defined $i)$ analytical schemas tailored to heterogeneous, semantics-rich RDF graph, $\left(ii\right)$ analytical queries which (beyond relational cubes) allow flexible querying of the data and the schema as well as powerful aggregation and $\left(iii\right)$ OLAP-style operations. We implemented our RDF analytics platform on top of the KDB system and ported it on Postgres as well [11] , [29] ; work is ongoing to adapt it on a massively parallel RDF query evaluation platform, namely CliqueSquare (see below). In [25] , we describe novel techniques for optimizing the evaluation of RDF analytical queries based on previously computed analytical query results.

Second, we continued our work on efficient evaluation of queries on RDF data, in the presence of constraints. Reformulation-based query answering is a query processing technique aiming at answering queries against data, under constraints. It consists of reformulating the query based on the constraints, so that evaluating the reformulated query directly against the data (i.e. without considering any more the constraints) produces the correct answer set. We have show how to optimize reformulation-based query answering in the setting of ontology-based data access, where SPARQL conjunctive queries are posed against RDF facts on which constraints expressed by an RDF Schema hold. The literature provides solutions for various fragments of RDF, aiming at computing the equivalent union of maximally-contained conjunctive queries w.r.t. the constraints. However, in general, such a union is large, thus it cannot be efficiently processed by a query engine. In this context, we have shown that generalizing the query reformulation language allows considering a space of reformulated queries (instead of a single possible choice), and selecting tthe reformulated query with lower estimated evaluation cost. We have shown experimentally that our technique enables reformulation-based query answering where the state-of-the-art approaches are simply unfeasible, while it may decrease their costs by orders of magnitude in other cases [21] , [27] .

Third, we have continued our work on cloud-based RDF data management. In [23] , we have demonstrated CliqueSquare, a platform we developed in the team for the massively parallel processing of RDF queries. CliqueSquare enjoys the benefits of a query optimization algorithm which creates query plans as flat as possible, which in turn translates into massive opportunities for parallel processing. In [24] , we have finalized our work on managing RDF data within the Amazon Web Services cloud. Finally, we have conducted a study of the existing models and algorithms published so far for the massively parrallel processing of RDF queries, which appeared as a survey in the VLDB Journal [4] and was also the basis of a tutorial at the ACM SIGMOD conference.