Querying APIs with SPARQL

Abstract

Although the amount of RDF data has been steadily increasing over the years, the majority of information on the Web is still residing in other formats, and is often not accessible to Semantic Web services. A lot of this data is available through APIs serving JSON documents. In this work we propose a way of extending SPARQL with the option to consume JSON APIs and integrate this information into SPARQL query answers, obtaining a language that combines data from the “traditional” Web to the Semantic Web. Our proposal is based on an extension of the SERVICE operator with the ability to connect to JSON APIs. With the aim of evaluating these queries as efficiently as possible, we show that the main bottleneck is the amount of API requests, and present an algorithm that produces “worst-case optimal” query plans that reduce the number of requests as much as possible. We note that the analysis of this algorithm is studied in terms of an algorithm for evaluating relational queries with access methods with the minimal number of access queries, which is of independent interest. We show the superiority of the worst-case optimal approach in a series of experiments that take existing SPARQL benchmarks, and augment them with the ability to connect to JSON APIs in order to obtain additional information.