GraphDB SE

What’s in this document?

What makes GraphDB SE different?

  • 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 the data volume and loading and inferencing speed;
  • High performance load, query and inference simultaneously;
  • 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 Standard (SE) is the commercial standalone edition of GraphDB. It is implemented in Java and packaged as a Storage and Inference Layer (SAIL) for the RDF4J RDF framework. GraphDB SE 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 SE can manage billions of explicit statements on a desktop hardware and can handle tens of billions of statements on a commodity server hardware. According to the LDBC Semantic Publishing Benchmark, GraphDB SE is one of the most scalable OWL repositories currently available.

Comparison of GraphDB Free and GraphDB SE

GraphDB SE and GraphDB Free – 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 SE
  • suitable for heavy query loads.
GraphDB Free
  • suitable for low query loads and smaller projects.