Querying the web of interlinked datasets using VOID descriptions

Query processing is an important way of accessing data on the Semantic Web. Today, the Semantic Web is characterized as a web of interlinked datasets, and thus querying the web can be seen as dataset integration on the web. Also, this dataset integration must be transparent from the data consumer as if she is querying the whole web. To decide which datasets should be selected and integrated for a query, one requires a metadata of the web of data. In this paper, to enable this transparency, we introduce a federated query engine called WoDQA (Web of Data Query Analyzer) which discovers datasets relevant with a query in an automated manner using VOID documents as metadata. WoDQA focuses on powerful dataset elimination by analyzing query structure with respect to the metadata of datasets. Dataset and linkset descriptions in VOID documents are analyzed for a SPARQL query and a federated query is constructed. By means of linkset concept of VOID, links between datasets are incorporated into selection of federated data sources. Current version ofWoDQA is available as a SPARQL endpoint.