Section: Research Program

Background

The main objective of Links is to develop methods for querying and managing linked data collections. Even though open linked data is the most prominent example, we will focus on hybrid linked data collections, which are collections of semi-structured datasets in hybrid formats: graph-based, rdf , relational, and NoSQL . The elements of these datasets may be linked, either by pointers or by additional relations between the elements of the different datasets, for instance the “same-as” or “member-of” relations as in rdf .

The advantage of traditional data models is that there exist powerful querying methods and technologies that one might want to preserve. In particular, they come with powerful schemas that constraint the possible manners in which knowledge is represented to a finite number of patterns. The exhaustiveness of these patterns is essential for writing of queries that cover all possible cases. Pattern violations are excluded by schema validation. In contrast, rdf schema languages such as rdfs can only enrich the relations of a dataset by new relations, which also helps for query writing, but which cannot constraint the number of possible patterns, so that they do not come with any reasonable notion of schema validation.

The main weakness of traditional formats, however, is that they do not scale to large data collections as stored on the Web, while the rdf data models scales well to very big collections such as linked open data. Therefore, our objective is to study mixed data collections, some of which may be in rdf format, in which we can lift the advantages of smaller datasets in traditional formats to much larger linked data collections. Such data collections are typically distributed over the internet, where data sources may have rigid query facilities that cannot be easily adapted or extended.

The main assumption that we impose in order to enable the logical approach, is that the given linked data collection must be correct in most dimensions. This means that all datasets are well-formed with respect to their available constraints and schemas, and clean with respect to the data values in most of the components of the relations in the datasets. One of the challenges is to integrate good quality rdf datasets into this setting, another is to clean the incorrect data in those dimensions that are less proper. It remains to be investigated in how far these assumptions can be maintained in realistic applications, and how much they can be weakened otherwise.

For querying linked data collections, the main problems are to resolve the heterogeneity of data formats and schemas, to understand the efficiency and expressiveness of recursive queries, that can follow links repeatedly, to answer queries under constraints, and to optimize query answering algorithms based on static analysis. When linked data is dynamically created, exchanged, or updated, the problems are how to process linked data incrementally, and how to manage linked data collections that change dynamically. In any case (static and dynamic) one needs to find appropriate schema mappings for linking semi-structured datasets. We will study how to automatize parts of this search process by developing symbolic machine learning techniques for linked data collections.