RDF query relaxation strategies based on failure causes

Abstract

Recent advances in Web-information extraction have led to the creation of several large Knowledge Bases (KBs). Querying these KBs often results in empty answers that do not serve the users’ needs. Relaxation of the failing queries is one of the cooperative techniques used to retrieve alternative results. Most of the previous work on RDF query relaxation compute a set of relaxed queries and execute them in a similarity-based ranking order. Thus, these approaches relax an RDF query without knowing its failure causes (FCs). In this paper, we study the idea of identifying these FCs to speed up the query relaxation process. We propose three relaxation strategies based on various information levels about the FCs of the user query and of its relaxed queries as well. A set of experiments conducted on the LUBM benchmark show the impact of our proposal in comparison with a state-of-the-art algorithm.