ERDF: Live Discovery for the Web of Data
Christophe Guéret, Paul Thomas Groth, Stefan Schlobach · 2009
Abstract. eRDF is an infrastructure for exploring the Web of Data through evolutionary querying. The main idea is to employ the wellknown strength of evolutionary strategies to find good, though possibly approximate, answers quickly. This allows us discover relevant answers to a user’s information need in an anytime way. As the system is based on the idea of guessing and verifying solutions, it does not require complex joins, which implies that we can easily query distributed data-sets (in our case live SPARQL endpoints) thus data can be both local and distributed. This allows eRDF to scale, eg., our current system provides access to the Billion Triple Challenge (BTC) data set plus several other large datasets. Another important feature of our methodology is that it is robust against complex SPARQL queries, which is a crucial feature for discovery queries. The basic functionality of our infrastructure is provided by a simple exploratory SPARQL endpoint, which allows discovery queries over the