DynamiTE: Parallel materialization of dynamic RDF data

One of the main advantages of using semantically annotated data is that machines can reason on it, deriving implicit knowledge from explicit information. In this context, materializing every possible implicit derivation from a given input can be computationally expensive, especially when considering large data volumes. Most of the solutions that address this problem rely on the assumption that the information is static, i.e., that it does not change, or changes very infrequently. However, the Web is extremely dynamic: online newspapers, blogs, social networks, etc., are frequently changed so that outdated information is removed and replaced with fresh data. This demands for a materialization that is not only scalable, but also reactive to changes. In this paper, we consider the problem of incremental materialization, that is, how to update the materialized derivations when new data is added or removed. To this purpose, we consider the ρdf RDFS fragment [12], and present a parallel system that implements a number of algorithms to quickly recalculate the derivation. In case new data is added, our system uses a parallel version of the well-known semi-naive evaluation of Datalog. In case of removals, we have implemented two algorithms, one based on previous theoretical work, and another one that is more efficient since it does not require a complete scan of the input. We have evaluated the performance using a prototype system called DynamiTE, which organizes the knowledge bases with a number of indices to facilitate the query process and exploits parallelism to improve the performance. The results show that our methods are indeed capable to recalculate the derivation in a short time, opening the door to reasoning on much more dynamic data than is currently possible. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.