Persistence of RDF Data into NoSQL: A Survey and a Reference Architecture

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering 2022-03, Vol.34 (3), p.1370-1389
• Main Authors: Santana, Luiz Henrique Zambom, Mello, Ronaldo dos Santos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; Big Data; Computer architecture; Data models; Indexing; Information management; Internet of Things; NoSQL; NoSQL databases; RDF; Resource description framework; Scalability; Semantic Web; SPARQL
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2020.2994521

RDF is being increasingly considered in a broad range of information management scenarios. Governments, large corporations, startups, and other organizations around the world are using RDF as a data model to represent and share knowledge. However, there is still a long evolutionary track with multiple challenges for RDF reaching the scale of the most recent Big Data intensive applications (e.g., Smart Cities, Sensor Networks, eHealth, Internet of Things). In this survey, we review the usage of NoSQL databases to the storage of large RDF graphs by rehearsing the latest surveys and expanding their findings by updating proposals and bringing light to aspects such as model mapping between RDF and NoSQL, triple indexing and partitioning, graph fragmentation and data caching. Moreover, we explain how the surveyed works extended the RDF capabilities so the datasets can benefit of the characteristics of scalability, schemaless data, and better overall performance of NoSQL databases. The survey summarizes the current state of art, discusses open problems, and proposes a Reference Architecture (RA). For the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey where the focus is solely on papers that use one or more NoSQL systems for the RDF persistence.