Replication and versioning of partial RDF graphs

Abstract

The sizes of datasets available as RDF (e.g., as part of the Linked Data cloud) are increasing continuously. For instance, the recent DBpedia version consists of nearly 500 millions triples. A common strategy to avoid problems that arise e.g., from limited network connectivity or lack of bandwidth is to replicate data locally, therefore making them accessible for applications without depending on a network connection. For mobile devices with limited capabilities, however, the replication and synchronization of billions of triples is not feasible. To overcome this problem, we propose an approach to replicate parts of an RDF graph to a client. Applications may then apply changes to this partial replica while being offline; these changes are written back to the original data source upon reconnection. Our approach does not require any kind of additional logic (e.g., change logging) or data structures on the client side, and hence is suitable to be applied on devices with limited computing power and storage capacity. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.