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Title SPORTAL: Profiling the Content of Public SPARQL Endpoints
Authors Ali Hasnain, Qaiser Mehmood, Syeda Sana e Zainab, Aidan Hogan
Publication date 2016
Abstract Access to hundreds of knowledge-bases has been made
available on
the Web through public SPARQL endpoints. Unfortunately, few endpoints
publish descriptions of their content (e.g., using VoID). It is thus unclear
how agents can learn about the content of a given SPARQL endpoint or,
relatedly, find SPARQL endpoints with content relevant to their needs. In
this paper, we investigate the feasibility of a system that gathers
information about public SPARQL endpoints by querying them directly about
their own content. With the advent of SPARQL 1.1 and features such as
aggregates, it is now possible to specify queries whose results would form a
detailed profile of the content of the endpoint, comparable with a large
subset of VoID. In theory it would thus be feasible to build a rich
centralised catalogue describing the content indexed by individual endpoints
by issuing them SPARQL (1.1) queries; this catalogue could then be searched
and queried by agents looking for endpoints with content they are interested
in. In practice, however, the coverage of the catalogue is bounded by the
limitations of public endpoints themselves: some may not support SPARQL 1.1,
some may return partial responses, some may throw exceptions for expensive
aggregate queries, etc. Our goal in this paper is thus twofold: (i) using
VoID as a bar, to empirically investigate the extent to which public
endpoints can describe their own content, and (ii) to build and analyse the
capabilities of a best-effort online catalogue of current endpoints based on
the (partial) results collected.
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Pages 134-163
Volume 12
Journal name International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems
Publisher IGI Global (Hershey, PA, USA)
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