GraphDB Free

What makes GraphDB Free different?

  • Free to use;
  • Manage 10’s of billions of RDF statements on a single server;
  • Performs query and reasoning operations using file-based indices;
  • Full SPARQL 1.1 support;
  • Easy JAVA deployment and portability;
  • Scalability, both in terms of data volume and loading and inferencing speed;
  • Compatible with RDF4J 2.0;
  • Compatible with Jena with a built-in adapter;
  • Full standard-compliant reasoning for RDFS, OWL 2 RL and QL;
  • Support for custom reasoning rulesets; performance optimised rulesets;
  • Optimised support for data integration through owl:sameAs;
  • Special indices for efficient geo-spatial constraints (near-by, within, distance);
  • Full-text search, based on Lucene;
  • Efficient retraction of inferred statements upon update;
  • Reliable data preservation, consistency and integrity;
  • Import/export of RDF syntaxes through RDF4J: XML, N3, N-Triples, N-Quads, Turtle, TriG, TriX;
  • API plugin framework, public classes and interfaces;
  • Query optimiser allowing for the evaluation of different query plans;
  • RDF rank to order query results by relevance or other measures;
  • Notification allowing clients to react to statements in the update stream;
  • Lucene connector for extremely fast normal and faceted (aggregation) searches; automatically stays up-to-date with the GraphDB data;
  • GraphDB Workbench - the default web-based administration tool;
  • LoadRDF for very fast repository creation from big datasets;

GraphDB Free is the free standalone edition of GraphDB. It is implemented in Java and packaged as a Storage and Inference Layer (SAIL) for the RDF4J RDF framework. GraphDB Free is a native RDF rule-entailment and storage engine. The supported semantics can be configured through ruleset definition and selection. Included are rulesets for OWL-Horst, unconstrained RDFS with OWL Lite and the OWL2 profiles RL and QL. Custom rulesets allow tuning for optimal performance and expressivity.

Reasoning and query evaluation are performed over a persistent storage layer. Loading, reasoning and query evaluation proceed extremely quickly even against huge ontologies and knowledge bases.

GraphDB Free can manage billions of explicit statements on a desktop hardware and can handle tens of billions of statements on a commodity server hardware.

Comparison of GraphDB Free and GraphDB SE

GraphDB Free and GraphDB SE – are identical in terms of usage and integration and share most features:

  • designed as an enterprise-grade semantic repository system;
  • suitable for massive volumes of data;
  • file-based indices (enables it to scale to billions of statements even on desktop machines);
  • inference and query optimisations (ensures fast query evaluations).
GraphDB Free
  • suitable for low query loads and smaller projects.
GraphDB SE
  • suitable for heavy query loads.