On the Selection of SPARQL Endpoints to Efficiently Execute Federated SPARQL Queries.

We consider the problem of source selection and query decomposition in federations of SPARQL endpoints, where query decompositions of a SPARQL query should reduce execution time and maximize answer completeness. This problem is in general intractable, and performance and answer completeness of SPARQL queries can be considerably affected when the number of SPARQL endpoints in a federation increases. We devise a formalization of this problem as the Vertex Coloring Problem and propose an approximate algorithm named Fed-DSATUR. We rely on existing results from graph theory to characterize the family of SPARQL queries for which Fed-DSATUR can produce optimal decompositions in polynomial time on the size of the query, i.e., on the number of SPARQL triple patterns in the query. Fed-DSATUR scales up much better to SPARQL queries with a large number of triple patterns, and may exhibit significant improvements in performance while answer completeness remains close to 100ï %. More importantly, we put our results in perspective, and provide evidence of SPARQL queries that are hard to decompose and constitute new challenges for data management.