Evaluation of relational database implementation of triple-stores

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the logical data model of the Semantic Web. RDF encodes information as a directed graph using a set of labeled edges known formally as resource-property-value statements or, in common usage, as RDF triples or simply triples. Values recorded in RDF triple form are either Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) or literals. The use of URIs allows links between distributed data sources, which enables a logical model of data as a graph spanning the Internet. SPARQL is a standard SQL-like query language on RDF triples. This report describes the translation of SPARQL queries to equivalent SQL queries operating on a relational representation of RDF triples, and the physical optimization of that representation using the IBM DB2 relational database management system. Performance was evaluated using the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark. The results show that the implementation can perform well on certain queries, but more work is required to improved overall performance and scalability.