A Study of RDB-Based RDF Data Management Techniques

RDF has gained great interest in both academia and industry as an important language to describe graph data. Several approaches have been proposed for storing and querying RDF data efficiently; each works best under certain circumstances, e.g. certain types of data and/or queries. However, there was lack of a thorough understanding of exactly what these circumstances are, as different data-sets and query sets are used in the empirical evaluations in the literature to highlight their proposed techniques. In this work, we capture the characteristics of data and queries that are critical to the RDF storage and query evaluation efficiency and provide a thorough analysis of the existing storage, indexing and query evaluation techniques based on these characteristics. We believe that our study not only can be used in evaluating both existing and emerging RDF data management techniques, but also lays the foundations for designing RDF benchmarks for more in-depth performance analysis of RDF data management systems.