Jesse Weaver RDF Management Approaches Joshua Taylor 3

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• Question is for the Presentation: Jesse Weaver RDF Management Approaches
• Question is asked by: Joshua Taylor
• The Question is: In the Conclusion, the authors point out that storing the data in a relational database whose schema is based on the ontology at hand performed better than any of the other RDF stores. This is not particularly surprising, as it the most specialized, but least flexible, representation. I wonder if a hybrid approach in which database tables are constructed based on formal ontology descriptions (e.g., in RDFS or OWL), and triples using this vocabulary are stored in said specialized table, but other triples are stored using a more general approach (but within the same database) would be practical/useful, and how such a system would fare in this evaluation. What do you think?

Answer

The authors mentioned such a possible approach, but they called it "clustering" and didn't seem to mention how it can be used with ontology descriptions. Section 1 states:

"To overcome this deficiency, other physical organization techniques for RDF have been proposed [5–11]. One notable idea is to cluster RDF data, i.e. to group entities that are similar in structure [9, 10] and store them in flattened tables that contain all the shared properties. While this may significantly reduce the amount of joins in queries, it works out only for well-structured data. However, one strength of RDF is that it offers excellent support for scenarios with poorly structured information, where clustering is not a feasible solution."

One (or both, hard to remember) of [9] and [10] describes using this "clustering" to approach the problem that you've presented.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how such an approach would fare in this evaluation.