Reifying RDF: What Works Well With Wikidata?

In this paper, we compare various options for reifying RDF triples. We are motivated by the goal of representing Wikidata as RDF, which would allow legacy Semantic Web languages, techniques and tools – for example, SPARQL engines – to be used for Wikidata. However, Wikidata annotates statements with qualifiers and references, which require some notion of reification to model in RDF. We thus investigate four such options: (1) standard reification, (2) n-ary relations, (3) singleton properties, and (4) named graphs. Taking a recent dump of Wikidata, we generate the four RDF datasets pertaining to each model and discuss high-level aspects relating to data sizes, etc. To empirically compare the effect of the different models on query times, we collect a set of benchmark queries with four model-specific versions of each query. We present the results of running these queries against five popular SPARQL implementations: 4store, BlazeGraph, GraphDB, Jena TDB and Virtuoso.