RDF packages: a scheme for efficient reasoning and querying over large-scale RDF data

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to improve the performance of querying and reasoning and querying over large-scale Resource Description Framework (RDF) data. When processing RDF(S) data, RDFS entailment is performed which often generates a large number of additional triples, which causes a poor performance. To deal with large-scale RDF data, it is important to develop a scheme which enables the processing of large RDF data in an efficient manner. Design/methodology/approach - The authors propose RDF packages, which is a space efficient format for RDF data. In an RDF package, a set of triples of the same class or triples having the same predicate are grouped into a dedicated node named Package. Any RDF data can be represented using RDF packages, and vice versa. Findings - It is found that using RDF packages can significantly reduce the size of RDF data, even after RDFS entailment. The authors experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of triple size, reasoning speed, and querying speed. Research limitations/implications - The proposed scheme is useful in processing RDF(S) data, but it needs further development to deal with an ontological language such as OWL. Originality/value - An important feature of the RDF packages is that, when performing RDFS reasoning, there is no need to modify either reasoning rules or reasoning engine; while other related schemes require reasoning rules or reasoning engine to be modified.