This week we received notification from the EU that the LDBC project has been granted. We think this is great news. The LDBC project is a STREP and will run until Q2 2015. The LDBC project has direct roots in LOD2 as it sprang out of benchmarking activities in LOD2 WP2; where we tried to establish broader bonds with RDF database vendors worldwide. This “got out of hand” and outgrew the resources of LOD2 (it was not an original focus), so together with Orri Erling from Openlink, we started the process of creating this new project.
LDBC stands for Linked Data Benchmark Council, and linked data here of course comprises RDF data management, but also includes the emerging class of graph database systems.
The mission of the LDBC project is to establish a long-term independent association among RDF and Graph database companies that define benchmarks, specify benchmarking practices and publish officially vetted benchmark results. Beyond the project partners, many commercial vendors of RDF and Graph database systems have already expressed their interest in joining this council (once we have founded the legal entity.. it will take a few months still).
The motivation behind the project is to show the strengths (and weaknesses) of RDF and Graph database technologies to the wider IT community pondering the adoption of these technologies, by enabling comparisons between the various products but also with established relational database technologies. Also, by establishing competition on these benchmarks LDBC aims to foment technical progress in the RDF and Graph database systems.
The LDBC project partners include for the RDF database community Ontotext and Openlink; from the graph database side there is Neo Technologies (of neo4j fame) and Sparsity is indirectly involved through academic project partner UPC (Barcelona). Other project partners are University of Innsbruck, FORTH, VU University Amsterdam and Technical University Munich (TUM). The academic partners will help to provide the council with an initial set of benchmarks.
The technical topics of interest for benchmarking are:
- complex analytical queries for both graph and RDF
- graph analysis algorithms and traversals
- large-scale reasoning on RDF data
- transaction performance
- systems support for data integration and provenance
The use-case scenarios for these are:
- social networking (e.g. marketing companies)
- dynamic publishing (e.g. BBC)
- telecommunication network analysis
- bioinformatics data integration (e.g. Open Phacts)
LDBC interacts with users of Graph and RDF technologies through is Technical User Community (TUC), and the TUC is having its first users workshop next week Nov19+Nov20 in Barcelona on the premises of UPC. The main take-away for users to engage with the TUC is to influence the benchmarking agenda of the LDBC. Talk to us, and RDF vendors might start competing in how to best solve your problems! Even if the Barcelona meeting is too short notice, please drop a note if you want to be involved in the TUC or know people who should.
Finally, please fill in the questionnaire to tell us about your usage (problems) with RDF (or graph) database technologies. We will be looking at the questionnaire results that we have received by Friday November 16 to help set the agenda in the users meeting, so if you want to contribute already this week, that would be highly appreciated.
thanks for your time, also on behalf of the full LDBC consortium,
Peter Boncz
scientific director LDBC
VU University Amsterdam & CWI
