The Pros and Cons of RDF structure indexes

Abstract. During recent years, BigData trends resulted in an increasing number of large datasets. As a result, Semantic Web technologies not only have to face the difficulties stemming from sheer data size, but — arising from its intentions of interconnecting all relevant pieces of knowledge — other problems can appear because of the increased structural complexity of the data. As an answer to these challenges, there are several approaches to support the technologies by utilizing structure indexes in order to increase the efficiency of query evaluation. However, in our experience, the benefits of these methods depend largely on the structural properties of the data. In this paper we summarize our experiments conducted on a parameterizable dataset, with the intention of characterizing the relationship between the structural complexity of the data and the possible benefits of using a structure index.