The SPARQL standard provides operators to retrieve exact matches on data, such as graph patterns, filters and grouping. This work proposes and evaluates two new algebraic operators for SPARQL 1.1 that return similarity-based results instead of exact results. First, a similarity join operator is presented, which brings together similar mappings from two sets of solution mappings. Second, a clustering solution modifier is introduced, which instead of grouping solution mappings according to exact values, brings them together by using similarity criteria. For both cases, a variety of algorithms are proposed and analysed, and use-case queries that showcase the relevance and usefulness of the novel operators are presented. For similarity joins, experimental results are provided by comparing different physical operators over a set of real world queries, as well as comparing our implementation to the closest work found in the literature, DBSimJoin, a PostgreSQL extension that supports similarity joins. For clustering, synthetic queries are designed in order to measure the performance of the different algorithms implemented.

Federations of RDF data sources offer great potential for queries that cannot be answered by a single data source. However, querying such federations poses several challenges, one of which is that different but semantically-overlapping vocabularies may be used for the respective RDF data. Since the federation members usually retain their autonomy, this heterogeneity cannot simply be homogenized by modifying the data in the data sources. Therefore, handling this heterogeneity becomes a critical aspect of query planning and execution. We introduce an approach to address this challenge by leveraging vocabulary mappings for the processing of queries over federations with heterogeneous vocabularies. This approach not only translates SPARQL queries but also preserves the correctness of results during query execution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach and measure how the application of vocabulary mappings affects on the performance of federated query processing.

IMGpedia is a large-scale linked dataset that incorporates visual information of the images from the Wikimedia Commons dataset: it brings together descriptors of the visual content of 15 million images, 450 million visual-similarity relations between those images, links to image metadata from DBpedia Commons, and links to the DBpedia resources associated with individual images. In this paper we describe the creation of the IMGpedia dataset, provide an overview of its schema and statistics of its contents, offer example queries that combine semantic and visual information of images, and discuss other envisaged use-cases for the dataset.