International Workshop on Semantic Big Data (SBD 2017)

The current World-Wide Web enables an easy, instant access to a vast amount of online information. However, the content in the Web is typically for human consumption, and is not tailored for machine processing. The Semantic Web is hence intended to establish a machine-understandable Web, and is currently also used in many other domains and not only in the Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed a number of standards around this vision. Among them is the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is used as the data model of the Semantic Web. The W3C has also defined SPARQL as the RDF query language, RIF as the rule language, and the ontology languages RDFS and OWL to describe schemas of RDF. The usage of common ontologies increases interoperability between heterogeneous data sets, and the proprietary ontologies with the additional abstraction layer facilitate the integration of these data sets. Therefore, we can argue that the Semantic Web is ideally designed to work in heterogeneous Big Data environments.

We define Semantic Big Data as the intersection of Semantic Web data and Big Data. There are masses of Semantic Web data freely available to the public - thanks to the efforts of the linked data initiative. According to http://stats.lod2.eu/ the current freely available Semantic Web data is approximately 150 billion triples in over 2,800 datasets, many of which are accessible via SPARQL query servers called SPARQL endpoints. Everyone can submit SPARQL queries to SPARQL endpoints via a standardized protocol, where the queries are processed on the datasets of the SPARQL endpoints and the query results are sent back in a standardized format. Hence, not only Semantic Big Data is freely available, but also distributed execution environments for Semantic Big Data are freely accessible. This makes the Semantic Web an ideal playground for Big Data research.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners to address the challenges and report and exchange the research findings in Semantic Big Data, including new approaches, techniques and applications, make substantial theoretical and empirical contributions to, and significantly advance the state of the art of Semantic Big Data.