Infrastructure for efficient exploration of large scale linked data via contextual tag clouds

Abstract

In this paper we present the infrastructure of the contextual tag cloud system which can execute large volumes of queries about the number of instances that use particular ontological terms. The contextual tag cloud system is a novel application that helps users explore a large scale RDF dataset: the tags are ontological terms (classes and properties), the context is a set of tags that defines a subset of instances, and the font sizes reflect the number of instances that use each tag. It visualizes the patterns of instances specified by the context a user constructs. Given a request with a specific context, the system needs to quickly find what other tags the instances in the context use, and how many instances in the context use each tag. The key question we answer in this paper is how to scale to Linked Data; in particular we use a dataset with 1.4 billion triples and over 380,000 tags. This is complicated by the fact that the calculation should, when directed by the user, consider the entailment of taxonomic and/or domain/range axioms in the ontology. We combine a scalable preprocessing approach with a specially-constructed inverted index and use three approaches to prune unnecessary counts for faster intersection computations. We compare our system with a state-of-the-art triple store, examine how pruning rules interact with inference and analyze our design choices. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.