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Super-Fast RDF Search Engine Developed

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the google-to-buy-ireland dept.

The Register is reporting that Irish researchers have developed a new high-speed RDF search engine capable of answering search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second. "'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. 'These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.'"

10 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. This could be huge by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except for the minor little problem of getting everyone to agree on the ontologies. Being able to search quickly is important, but until somebody comes up with the Dewey Decimal System for all knowledge, it won't mean much.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  2. Hype by gvc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    users should get more relevant results


    Yet another /. article parroting an uncritical popular press account of a press release.
  3. Re:Great!! by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Informative

    Now all we need to do is get everyone to start using RDF.... wait.. you dont even know what that is??
    It's the Resource Description Framework, which RSS is a subset of.
    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  4. Next up: Ontology spam by G4from128k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, creating a consistent ontology is challenge. But the bigger challenge is the lack of incentive for ontology truthfulness. If this type of search becomes popular, ontology spam and OSEO (Ontology Search Engine Optimization) will become a booming industry.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
  5. RDF? by lancelotlink · · Score: 4, Funny

    I didn't realize Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field was able to be harnessed and bottled in a search engine, or any software for that matter. His abilities are boundless!

  6. Cannot be overestimated by stevenp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    - "The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated"

    The importance of any event can be overestimated and quite often is overestimated. It is called hype.
    When speaking of XML, XHTML and semantic WEB then the word "overestimated" fits just nice.
    If this was not the case then HTML should long have been dead and the whole WEB should have been based on pure XML with meaningful tags.

    -- Do not read me, I am a stupid tag

  7. Could be interesting, but missing details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What kind of data set did they use? The structure and contents of the graph that is the data in an RDF database has a huge impact on the performance of query execution, and different applications have different structures.

    What kind of queries are they running? There are several different RDF query languages (think of SeRQL, RDQL, N3, SPARQL, etcetera) and some of them support quite complex queries. Quickly finding the answers to a simple query like

    SELECT ?name WHERE ?name <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> "John Smith"
    is just a matter of an indexed lookup and not very special. But, like in SQL, much more complex expressions can be generated that require complex index operations on the query execution level. Having implemented an RDF database that supports SPARQL queries an order of magnitude faster than the software the W3C uses for their experiments (which, admitedly, doesn't have performance as a prime requirement), I know that it's possible to do simple things fast, but the interesting part is handling RDF queries that don't easily map to efficient database operations.

    Which brings me to the most important point: where is their detailed report? Can I get the software somewhere and perform my own tests? The article is too vague to draw any conclusions about what their RDF database does, and how good it is. I'd love to read up on it, but I can't seem to find the information.
  8. Re:TMA: Too Many Acronyms by QuickFox · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why assume everyone knows your acronyms.

    OMG: Oh my God!
    WTF: What the fuck?
    BBQ: Barbecue.

    HTH

    --
    Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  9. Here's the Tech Report by aharth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hello, I am one of the main developers of SWSE. True, the press release is vague, but there is only so much you can say in a press release aimed for the general public.

    We have a Technical Report available at http://www.deri.ie/fileadmin/documents/DERI-TR-200 7-04-20.pdf that should answer most of the technical questions.

    From the abstract:

    "We present the architecture of an end-to-end search engine that uses a graph data model to enable interactive query answering over structured and interlinked data collected from many disparate sources on the Web.

    In particular, we study distributed indexing methods for graph-structured data and parallel query evaluation methods on a cluster of computers.

    We evaluate the system on a dataset with 430 million statements collected from the Web, and provide scale-up experiments on 7 billion synthetically generated statements."

  10. Re:Official DERI Website by PDHoss · · Score: 4, Funny

    I tried to access that site, and I got a good look at their DERI Error.

    --
    ======================================
    Writers get in shape by pumping irony.