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Handling failing RDF queries: from diagnosis to relaxation

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the development of large knowledge bases (KBs). Due to the lack of information about the content and schema semantics of KBs, users are often not able to correctly formulate KB queries that return the intended result. In this paper, we consider the problem of failing RDF queries, i.e., queries that return an empty set of answers. Query relaxation is one cooperative technique proposed to solve this problem. In the context of RDF data, several works proposed query relaxation operators and ranking models for relaxed queries. But none of them tried to find the causes of an RDF query failure given by Minimal Failing Subqueries (MFSs) as well as successful queries that have a maximal number of triple patterns named Ma \(\underline{x}\) imal Succeeding Subqueries (XSSs). Inspired by previous work in the context of relational databases and recommender systems, we propose two complementary approaches to fill this gap. The lattice-based approach (LBA) leverages the theoretical properties of MFSs and XSSs to efficiently explore the subquery lattice of the failing query. The matrix-based approach computes a matrix that records alternative answers to the failing query with the triple patterns they satisfy. The skyline of this matrix directly gives the XSSs of the failing query. This matrix can also be used as an index to improve the performance of LBA. The practical interest of these two approaches are shown via a set of experiments conducted on the LUBM benchmark and a comparative study with baseline and related work algorithms.

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Notes

  1. Numbers current as of February 2015.

  2. For readability, we use names instead of URIs to identify the query elements.

  3. Given a set of objects described by a list of criteria, a skyline is a subset of objects that are not dominated (in the sense of Pareto) by any other object with respect to some criteria of interest.

  4. To ensure that subqueries of an MFS are successful, it is defined that \([[\emptyset ]]_{D} \ne \emptyset \).

  5. As the semantics of SPARQL is never null-rejecting, contrary to the relational algebra, this expression is not equivalent to: .

  6. The coalesce function returns the first non-null expression in the list of parameters.

  7. For readability, we shorten the URIs.

  8. MFSs which are only poorly satisfied, i.e., that do not return any answer with at least a satisfaction degree equals to \(\alpha \) (a user-defined threshold).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers as well as Patrice Naudin and Pascal Richard for their very useful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIAS/ISAE-ENSMA, University of Poitiers, 1, Avenue Clement Ader, 86960, Futuroscope Cedex, France

    Géraud Fokou, Stéphane Jean, Allel Hadjali & Mickael Baron

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  1. Géraud Fokou
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  2. Stéphane Jean
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  3. Allel Hadjali
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Correspondence to Stéphane Jean.

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Fokou, G., Jean, S., Hadjali, A. et al. Handling failing RDF queries: from diagnosis to relaxation. Knowl Inf Syst 50, 167–195 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-016-0941-0

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