A node indexing scheme for web entity retrieval

Abstract

Now motivated also by the partial support of major search engines, hundreds of millions of documents are being published on the web embedding semi-structured data in RDF, RDFa and Microformats. This scenario calls for novel information search systems which provide effective means of retrieving relevant semi-structured information. In this paper, we present an "entity retrieval system" designed to provide entity search capabilities over datasets as large as the entire Web of Data. Our system supports full-text search, semi-structural queries and top-k query results while exhibiting a concise index and efficient incremental updates. We advocate the use of a node indexing scheme and show that it offers a good compromise between query expressiveness, query processing time and update complexity in comparison to three other indexing techniques. We then demonstrate how such system can effectively answer queries over 10 billion triples on a single commodity machine. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.