Everything you always wanted to know about blank nodes (but were afraid to ask)

Hogan, Aidan and Arenas, Macelo and Mallea, Alejandro and Polleres, Axel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5670-1146 (2014) Everything you always wanted to know about blank nodes (but were afraid to ask). Journal of Web Semantics, 27 (1). pp. 42-69. ISSN 1570-8268

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Abstract

In this paper we thoroughly cover the issue of blank nodes, which have been defined in RDF as "existential variables". We first introduce the theoretical precedent for existential blank nodes from first order logic and incomplete Information in database theory. We then cover the different (and sometimes incompatible) treatment of blank nodes across the W3C stack of RDF-related standards. We present an empirical survey of the blank nodes present in a large sample of RDF data published on the Web (the BTC-2012 dataset), where we find that 25.7% of unique RDF terms are blank nodes, that 44.9% of documents and 66.2% of domains featured use of at least one blank node, and that aside from one Linked Data domain whose RDF data contains many "blank node cycles", the vast majority of blank nodes form tree structures that are efficient to compute simple entailment over. With respect to the RDF-merge of the full data, we show that 6.1% of blank-nodes are redundant under simple entailment. The vast majority of non-lean cases are isomorphisms resulting from multiple blank nodes with no discriminating information being given within an RDF document or documents being duplicated in multiple Web locations. Although simple entailment is NP-complete and leanness-checking is coNP-complete, in computing this latter result, we demonstrate that in practice, real-world RDF graphs are sufficiently "rich" in ground information for problematic cases to be avoided by non-naive algorithms.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The work presented in this article has been funded in part by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Líon- 2), by an IRCSET postgraduate grant, by Marie Curie action IRSES under Grant No. 24761 (Net2), by FONDECYT Grant No. 1131049 and by the Millennium Nucleus Center for SemanticWeb Research under Grant No. NC120004.
Keywords:	blank nodes, rdf, simple entailment, leanness, skolemisation, semantic web, linked data
Divisions:	Departments > Informationsverarbeitung u Prozessmanag. > Informationswirtschaft > Polleres
Version of the Document:	Submitted
Depositing User:	Gertraud Novotny
Date Deposited:	12 Dec 2016 15:52
Last Modified:	15 Jul 2020 15:45
Related URLs:	Publisher http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index...
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/69545/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/5332

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