A metamodel approach to semantic web data management

Abstract

The Semantic Web is gaining increasing interest to fulfill the need of sharing, retrieving and reusing information. In this context, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been conceived to provide an easy way to represent any kind of data and metadata, according to a lightweight model and syntaxes for serialization (RDF/XML, N3, etc.). Despite RDF has the advantage of being general and simple, it cannot be used as a storage model as it is, since it can be easily shown that even simple management operations involve serious performance limitations. In this paper, we present a novel approach for storing, managing and processing RDF data in an effective and efficient way. The approach is based on the notion of construct, that represents a concept of the domain of interest. This makes the approach easily extensible and independent from the specific knowledge representation language. We refer to real world scenarios in which we consider complex data management operations, which go beyond simple selections or projections and involve the navigation of huge portions of RDF data sources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.