Temporal data representation and querying based on RDF

Abstract

With the explosive growth of temporal data, how to query and manage temporal data has become an important research issue. Resource description framework (RDF), as the standard data and knowledge description language of the semantic web, has been widely used to represent various domain data. Aiming at the representation and querying of temporal data, this paper proposes a temporal data representation model based on RDF and its corresponding querying method. First, a representation model called RDFt is proposed, which can represent temporal data with both the time information and the update count information, and the syntax and semantics of the RDFt model are given. Then, we propose a query language called SPARQL[t] for RDFt, and we give the query syntax and operations of SPARQL[t] in detail. In addition, a querying transformation algorithm from SPARQL[t] to SPARQL is proposed, in order to achieve compatibility with the existing RDF query engines. Finally, we implemented a prototype system that can support RDFt temporal data representation and querying, and the case studies and experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.