Pleasantly Consuming Linked Data with RDF Data Descriptions

Abstract: Although the intention of RDF is to provide an open, minimally constraining way for representing information, there exists an increasing number of applications for which guarantees on the structure and values of an RDF data set become desirable if not essential. What is missing in this respect are mechanisms to tie RDF data to quality guarantees akin to schemata of relational databases, or DTDs in XML, in particular when translating legacy data coming with a rich set of integrity constraints - like keys or cardinality restrictions - into RDF. Addressing this shortcoming, we present the RDF Data Description language (RDD), which makes it possible to specify instance-level data constraints over RDF. Making such constraints explicit does not only help in asserting and maintaining data quality, but also opens up new optimization opportunities for query engines and, most importantly, makes query formulation a lot easier for users and system developers. We present design goals, syntax, and a formal, First-order logics based semantics of RDDs and discuss the impact on consuming Linked Data.