Super-Fast RDF Search Engine Developed

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.'"

This could be huge

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

I'll prove him wrong

[Big Nothing]

"'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI."

This is without a doubt the greatest invention in the history of time!

There, I just proved the professor wrong. Muahaha.

Could be interesting, but missing details

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

sounds fishy

[vga_init]

Of course a search based on meta data is going to be faster and more accurate, but only when the meta data is correct. We've had this since the beginning of the interweb; people would load up their pages with bogus meta data just to generate search traffic. Because of this dishonesty, search engines have had to resort to other methods of evaluating and indexing pages (for example, based on actual content).

I don't see any difference between this new RDF and that old stuff.

Re:This could be huge

[spemen]

Actually there is a lot of research being done to get around the need for a 'Dewey Decimal System'. The idea is to analyze relations between terms (names, datatypes, ect.) in an ontology. One could also compare relationships between terms: A child of B, C child of D, and A=B does B==A ?? Please note that these are examples of how terms and ontologies *could* be matched and not necessarily how someone would match terms. http://www.ontologymatching.org/ [ontologymatching.org] Also, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ [princeton.edu] is a project I think is in the direction of a 'Dewey Decimal System' for knowlege.