A comparison of data structures to manage URIs on the web of data

Abstract

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are one of the corner stones of the Web; They are also exceedingly important on the Web of data, since RDF graphs and Linked Data both heavily rely on URIs to uniquely identify and connect entities. Due to their hierarchical structure and their string serialization, sets of related URIs typically contain a high degree of redundant information and are systematically dictionary-compressed or encoded at the back-end (e.g., in the triple store). The paper represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first systematic comparison of the most common data structures used to encode URI data. We evaluate a series of data structures in term of their read/write performance and memory consumption.