SDA at SEMANTiCS 2017 & a Best Paper Award

logo-semantics-17-smallSEMANTiCS 2017 is an international event on Linked Data and the Semantic Web where business users, vendors and academia meet. Our members have actively participated in 13th SEMANTiCS 2017, which took place in Amsterdam, Nederland, Sept 11-14.


We are very pleased to announce that we got 7 papers accepted at SEMANTiCS 2017 for presentation at the main conference. Additionally, we also had 4 Posters and 2 Demo papers accepted at the same.

Furthermore, adding a feather to our hat, our colleague Harsh Thakkar (@harsh9t) secured a Best Research and Innovation Paper Award for his work “Trying Not to Die Benchmarking – Orchestrating RDF and Graph Data Management Solution Benchmarks Using LITMUS” (Github Org., Website, Docker, PDF).

Abstract. Knowledge graphs, usually modelled via RDF or property graphs, have gained importance over the past decade. In order to decide which Data Management Solution (DMS) performs best for specific query loads over a knowledge graph, it is required to perform benchmarks. Benchmarking is an extremely tedious task demanding repetitive manual effort, therefore it is advantageous to automate the whole process. However, there is currently no benchmarking framework which supports benchmarking and comparing diverse DMSs for both RDF and property graph DMS. To this end, we introduce, the rst working prototype of, LITMUS which provides this functionality as well as ne-grained environment configuration options, a comprehensive set of DMS and CPU-specific key performance indicators and a quick analytical support via custom visualization (i.e. plots) for the benchmarked DMSs.

The audience displayed enthusiasm during the presentation appreciating the work and asking questions regarding the future of his work and possible synergy with industrial partners/projects.


Furthermore, an interested mass also indulged in the Poster & Demo session for their first-hand experience with LITMUS.

Among the other presentations, our colleagues presented the following research papers: 

  • SMJoin: A Multi-way Join Operator for SPARQL Queries by Mikhail Galkin, Kemele M. Endris, Maribel Acosta, Diego Collarana, Maria-Esther Vidal, Sören Auer.
    Mikhail Galkin presented his work on introducing a concept and practical approach for multi-way joins applicable in SPARQL query engines. Multi-way joins refer to operators of n-arity, i.e., supporting more than two inputs. A set of optimizations were proposed to increase the performance of a multi-way operator. The audience was particularly interested in experimental results, the impact of query selectivity and operator optimizations.
  • IDOL: Comprehensive & Complete LOD Insights by Ciro Baron Neto, Dimitris Kontokostas, Amit Kirschenbaum, Gustavo Publio, Diego Esteves, and Sebastian Hellmann.
    The presents challenges and technical barriers at identifying and linking the whole linked open data cloud using a probabilistic data structure called Bloom Filter. The audience was most interested in questions related to the problem of cross-dataset error correction as well as the generation of further analytics and heuristics metadata.

SEMANTiCS was a great venue to meet the community, create new connections, talk about current research challenges, share ideas and settle new collaborations. We look forward to the next SEMANTiCS conference.