RDF Keyword-based Query Technology Meets a Real-World Dataset

This paper presents the results of an industrial project, conducted by the TecGraf Institute and Petrobras (the Brazilian Petroleum Company), to develop a tool to facilitate access to a large database, with hydrocarbon exploration data, by combining RDF technology with keyword search. The tool features an algorithm to translate a keyword query into a SPARQL query such that each result of the SPARQL query is an answer for the keyword query. The algorithm explores the RDF schema of the RDF dataset to generate the SPARQL query and to avoid user intervention during the translation process. The tool offers an interface which allows the user to specify keywords, as well as filters and unit measures, and presents the results with the help of a table and a graph. Finally, the paper describes experiments which show that the tool achieves very good performance for the real-world industrial dataset and meets users’ expectations. The tool was further validated against full versions of the IMDb and Mondial datasets.