Star Pattern Fragments: Accessing Knowledge Graphs through Star Patterns

The Semantic Web offers access to a vast Web of interlinked information accessible via SPARQL endpoints. Such endpoints offer a well-defined interface to retrieve results for complex SPARQL queries. The computational load for processing such queries, however, lies entirely with the server hosting the SPARQL endpoint, which can easily become overloaded and in the worst case not only become slow in responding but even crash so that the data becomes temporarily unavailable. Recently proposed interfaces, such as Triple Pattern Fragments, have therefore shifted the query processing load from the server to the client. For queries involving triple patterns with low selectivity, this can easily result in high network traffic and slow execution times. In this paper, we therefore present a novel interface, Star Pattern Fragments (SPF), which decomposes SPARQL queries into star-shaped subqueries and can combine a lower network load with a higher query throughput and a comparatively low server load. Our experimental results show that our approach does not only significantly reduce network traffic but is also at least an order of magnitude faster in comparison to the state-of-the-art interfaces under high query processing load.