Interactive SPARQL query formulation using provenance

Yael Amsterdamer, Yehuda Callen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present in this paper a novel solution for assisting users in formulating SPARQL queries. The high-level idea is that users write “semi-formal SPARQL queries,” namely queries whose structure resembles SPARQL but are not necessarily grounded to the schema of the underlying knowledge graph and require only basic familiarity with SPARQL. This means that the user-intended query over the knowledge graph may differ from the specified semi-formal query in its structure and query elements. We design a novel framework that systematically and gradually refines the query to obtain candidate formal queries that do match the knowledge graph. Crucially, we introduce a formal notion of provenance tracking this query refinement process and use the tracked provenance to prompt the user for fine-grained feedback on parts of the candidate query, guiding our search. Experiments on a diverse query workload with respect to both DBpedia and YAGO show the usefulness of our approach.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2165-2191
Number of pages27
JournalKnowledge and Information Systems
Volume66
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023.

Funding

This work was partly funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 2015/21) and by the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology.

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation2015/21
Ministry of science and technology, Israel

    Keywords

    • Data exploration
    • Knowledge graph
    • Provenance
    • SPARQL

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