
Reasoning on Web Data: Algorithms and Performance [pdf] - jcr
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01148500/file/tutorial.pdf
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jcr
I found the submitted paper on the home page of one of its authors, Ioana
Manolescu. [1] According to her page, the paper is designed to be more of a
tutorial. Having a rough understanding of the Resource Description Framework
(RDF) [2], RDF Schema (RDFS) [3], and RDF Query Language (RDFQL) [4] certainly
helps, but is not required. If you think about the paper in terms of how a
major search engine like Google works, and you remember the occasional "index
updates" they used to do a few times a year, you'll see the "saturation" or
"closure" approach mentioned in the paper. i.e.

> _" compile the knowledge into data, as follows. Infer all possible facts
> derived from the base data and by the semantic constraints prior to querying
> the database; add these facts to the database; then, process queries on the
> (enriched) database ignoring the constraints which have lead to it."_

Since Google no longer does occasional "index updates" and now updates
continuously, it seems they may have moved to something similar to the
alternate "reformulation" approach mentioned in the paper:

> _" The alternative technique is called reformulation. Here, the database is
> left unchanged, while queries are modified (reformulated) to take into
> account all the known semantic constraints."_

[1]
[http://pages.saclay.inria.fr/ioana.manolescu/](http://pages.saclay.inria.fr/ioana.manolescu/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFS)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_query_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_query_language)

