Ontotext is pleased to announce the next GraphDB 9.9 release, which offers graph path search through SPARQL, experimental support for FedX federation, SHACL performance improvements and numerous fixes.
Explore Multi-Hop Relationships with the Graph Path Search Extension
The SPARQL 1.1 property paths, supported by GraphDB enable graph traversal, allowing you to discover relationships between resources through arbitrary length patterns. Property paths uncover the start and end nodes of a specific path, but not the intermediate ones, meaning that traceability remains a challenge. This is a major limitation, because traceability is a key factor in a variety of use cases and fields, such as data fabric analysis of supply chains, clinical trials in drug research, or social media management, discovering connections between resources must come hand in hand with the ability to explain them to key stakeholders.
GraphDB 9.9 solves this problem by extending SPARQL with the Graph Path Search functionality that allows you to find complex relationships between resources, explore them and use them as filters to identify graph patterns. It includes features for Shortest path and All paths search, which enable you to explore the connecting edges (RDF statements) between resources for the shortest property paths and subsequently for all connecting paths. Other supported features include finding the shortest distance between resources, discovering cyclic dependencies in a graph, as well as wildcard property search and more targeted graph pattern search.
Unlike other vendor’s approach for proprietary extensions of SPARQL, the graph path search extension in GraphDB is implemented using standard SPARQL 1.1 syntax, which allows for easy integration into queries, without breaking existing SPARQL editors. This extension fills in the last gap of major functionality that the Property Graph-based engines had as advantage so far.
Integrate Heterogeneous Datasets with FedX Federation
GraphDB 9.9 introduces experimental support for FedX – the federation engine of the RDF4J framework, a data partitioning technology that provides transparent federation of multiple SPARQL endpoints under a single virtual endpoint.
In the context of the growing need for scalability of RDF technology and sophisticated optimization techniques for querying linked data, it is a useful framework that allows efficient SPARQL query processing on heterogeneous, virtually integrated linked data sources. With it, explicitly addressing specific endpoints using SERVICE clauses is no longer necessary – instead, FedX offers novel join processing and grouping techniques to minimize the number of remote requests by automatically selecting the relevant sources, sending statement patterns to these sources for evaluation, and joining the individual results.
FedX is still in active development and as such supports limited use-cases. Future versions will provide a more robust implementation.
Deployment and Performance Improvements
GraphDB 9.9 extends the Helm charts with support for backup and restore, as well as support for major cloud platforms. GraphDB also comes with the latest RDF4J 3.7.1, which includes many SHACL improvements and bug fixes. SHACL validation now works more reliably with bigger datasets.
Get ready to take advantage of all new GraphDB 9.9 features!
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext