Cluster-Based Joins for Federated SPARQL Queries

Federated RDF systems allow users to retrieve data from multiple independent sources without needing to have all the data in the same triple store. The performance of these systems can be poor for large and geographically distributed RDF data where network transfer costs are high. This article introduces CBTP-OL and CBTP-Nhop, two novel join algorithms that take advantage of network topology to decrease the cost of processing Basic Graph Pattern (BGP) SPARQL queries in a geographically distributed environment. Federation members are grouped in clusters, based on the network communication cost between the members, and the bulk of the join processing is pushed to the clusters. Our CBTP-OL and CBTL-Nhop algorithms use an overlap list and, respectively, an N-hop overlap list, to efficiently compute join results from triples in different clusters. We implement our algorithms in the OpenRDF Sesame federated framework and use Apache Rya triple store instances as federation members. Experimental evaluation results show the advantages of our approach over existing techniques.