Distributed Query Processing and Reasoning over Linked Big Data

Abstract

The enormous amount of structured and unstructured data on the web and the need to extract and derive useful knowledge from this big data make Semantic Web and Big Data Technology explorations of paramount importance. Open semantic web data created using standard protocols (RDF, RDFS, OWL) consists of billions of records in the form of data collections called “linked data”. With the ever-increasing linked big data on the Web, it is imperative to process this data with powerful and scalable techniques in distributed processing environments such as MapReduce. There are several distributed RDF processing systems, including SemaGrow, FedX, SPLENDID, PigSPARQL, SHARD, SPARQLGX, that are developed over the years. However, there is a need for computational and qualitative comparison of the differences and similarities among these systems. In this paper, we extend a previous comparative analysis to a diverse study with respect to qualitative and quantitative analysis views, through an experimental approach for these distributed RDF systems. We examine each of the selected RDF query systems with respect to the implementation setup, system architecture, underlying framework, and data storage. We use two widely used RDF benchmark datasets, FedBench and LUBM. Furthermore, we evaluate and examine their performances in terms of query execution time, thus, analyzing how those different types of large-scale distributed query engines, support long-running queries over federated data sources and the query processing times for different queries. The results of the experiments in this study show that SemaGrow distributed system performs more efficiently compared to FedX and Splendid, even though in smaller queries the former performs slower. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.