On the Efficiency of Querying and Storing RDF Documents

In the context of the Semantic Web, different approaches have been defined to represent RDF documents, and the selected representation affects storage and time complexity of the RDF data recovery and query processing tasks. This chapter addresses the problem of efficiently querying and storing RDF documents, and presents an alternative representation of RDF data, Bhyper, which is based on hypergraphs. Additionally, access and optimization techniques to efficiently execute queries with low cost, are defined on top of this hypergraph based representation. The chapter’s authors have empirically studied the performance of the Bhyper based techniques, and their experimental results show that the proposed hypergraph based formalization reduces the RDF data access time as well as the space needed to store the Bhyper structures, while the query execution time of state-the-of-art RDF engines can be sped up by up to two orders of magnitude. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-053-8.ch016