Publications

View publication

Title LDQL: A Query Language for the Web of Linked Data
Authors Olaf Hartig, Jorge Pérez
Publication date December 2016
Abstract The Web of Linked Data is composed of tons of RDF
documents
interlinked to each other forming a huge repository of distributed semantic
data. Effectively querying this distributed data source is an important open
problem in the Semantic Web area. In this paper, we propose LDQL, a
declarative language to query Linked Data on the Web. One of the novelties
of LDQL is that it expresses separately (i) patterns that describe the
expected query result, and (ii) Web navigation paths that select the data
sources to be used for computing the result. We present a formal syntax and
semantics, prove equivalence rules, and study the expressiveness of the
language. In particular, we show that LDQL is strictly more expressive than
all the query formalisms that have been proposed previously for Linked Data
on the Web. We also study some computability issues regarding LDQL. We first
prove that when considering the Web of Linked Data as a fully accessible
graph, the evaluation problem for LDQL can be solved in polynomial time.
Nevertheless, when the limited data access capabilities of Web clients are
considered, the scenario changes drastically; there are LDQL queries for
which a complete execution is not possible in practice. We formally study
this issue and provide a sufficient syntactic condition to avoid this
problem; queries satisfying this condition are ensured to have a procedure
to be effectively evaluated over the Web of Linked Data.
Downloaded 9 times
Pages 9-29
Volume 41
Journal name Journal of Web Semantics
Publisher Elsevier Science (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
PDF View PDF
Reference URL View reference page