Exploiting RDF open data using NoSQL graph databases

Abstract

RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a well-established format for representing data. Based on the so-called RDF triples, it allows to represent data and properties over the data through the subject-predicate-object framework. By linking objects defined by unique identifiers, it is widely used for Open Data and Linked Open Data. On the other hand, relationships between objects are more and more managed through NoSQL graph databases which use the property graph model to structure information. Such databases provide indeed very efficient tools for handling huge volumes of complex data. They are especially powerful for retrieving relationships between objects (as for instance the famous friend of friend query). While many works have dealt with the transformation from various data formats to RDF, no work has addressed, as far as we know, the transformation from RDF to NoSQL graph databases. We thus consider this topic in this paper by proposing transformation rules and by testing our approach on real data.