Fundamentos de Bases de Datos RDF / Foundations of RDF Databases
Dept. AI, UPM, Madrid, January 2009.
Profesor / Lecturer: Claudio Gutierrez, Universidad de Chile, cgutierr@dcc.uchile.cl
Idioma / Language: English / Spanish
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a metadata W3C standard
for describing information on the Web.
The motivation behind the development of RDF was, to borrow the words
Tim Berners-Lee used for the Semantic Web, "to have a common and
minimal language to enable to map large quantities of existing data
onto it so that the data can be analyzed in ways never dreamed of by
its creators." To bring to reality this vision, the processing of RDF
data at big scale must be viable. This challenge amounts essentially
to develop the theory and practice of RDF databases.
In this short course, we will present the current state of the theory of RDF
databases, from the perspective of the work of our (Santiago, Chile)
group. We will emphasize the presentation of open problems and
possible lines of research.
This short course is targeted at graduate students
interested in developments in Logic, Knowledge Representation and
Databases (motivated undergraduate of the last years
of the career are very welcome as well).
The expected background of prospective students is databases
and the basics of logic and KR.
The course will consists of 6 lectures (1 1/2 hour each).
The evaluation consists of a short test at the end of the course
(or the system that students and the administration at UPM agree).
Test on RDF Databases
Program (tentative)
- Introduction: Databases, Knowledge Representation, Metadata and
the challenges of massive processing on the Web.
- The RDF data model (from a database perspective.
Standard W3C specification and its core. A minimal and complete
fragment
Reference: Minimal Deductive Systems for RDF ,
(ESWC 2007)
- Basic theory of querying RDF and RDFS data.
The pattern matching paradigm for querying RDF.
Basic Notions.
Reference: Foundations of Semantic Web Databases ,
(PODS 2004).
- The formal semantics of SPARQL.
A formal compositional semantics for SPARQL. Comparison with
current W3C specification.
Reference: Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL , (ISWC 2006)
- Complexity and expresiveness of SPARQL
What is the expressive power of SPARQL?: Relational Algebra.
References: Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL , (ISWC 2006),
The Expressive Power of SPARQL , (ISWC 2008),
- Challenges of querying RDF from a graph database perspective.
The problem. The state of the art.
References: Survey of Graph Databases (ACM Surveys),
Querying RDF from a graph database perspective (ESWC 2005),
nSPARQL: A navigational language for SPARQL (ISWC 2008).
Slides
Other materials