Database technologies for RDF

Abstract

Efficient and scalable support for RDF/OWL data storage, loading, inferencing and querying, in conjunction with already available support for enterprise level data and operations reliability requirements, can make databases suitable to act as enterprise-level RDF/OWL repository and hence become a viable platform for building semantic applications for the enterprise environments. This tutorial outlines the requirements for supporting semantic technologies in databases including bulk load and data manipulation operations, inference based on RDFS, OWL and user-defined rules, and support for SPARQL queries. It also discusses the design choices for handling issues that arise in implementing support for storage and operations on large scale RDF/OWL data, and in general, touches upon the practical aspects related to RDF/OWL support that become important in enterprise environments. Semantic technologies support in Oracle Database is used as a case study to illustrate with concrete examples the key requirements and design issues. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.