A Comparison of Federation over SPARQL Endpoints Frameworks

The increasing amount of Linked Data and its inherent distributed nature have attracted significant attention throughout the research community and amongst practitioners to search data, in the past years. Inspired by research results from traditional distributed databases, different approaches for managing federation over SPARQL Endpoints have been introduced. SPARQL is the standardised query language for RDF, the default data model used in Linked Data deployments and SPARQL Endpoints are a popular access mechanism provided by many Linked Open Data (LOD) repositories. In this paper, we initially give an overview of the federation framework infrastructure and then proceed with a comparison of existing SPARQL federation frameworks. Finally, we highlight shortcomings in existing frameworks, which we hope helps spawning new research directions.