GraphDB Free

What makes GraphDB Free different?

  • Free to use

  • Manages tens of billions of RDF statements on a single server

  • Performs query and reasoning operations using file-based indexes

  • 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 optimized rulesets

  • Optimized support for data integration through owl:sameAs

  • Special indexes for efficient geospatial constraints (near-by, within, distance)

  • 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 optimizer allowing for the evaluation of different query plans

  • RDF rank to order query results by relevance or other measures

  • Notifications 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 indexes (enables it to scale to billions of statements even on desktop machines);

  • inference and query optimizations (ensures fast query evaluations).

GraphDB Free

  • suitable for low query loads and smaller projects.

GraphDB SE

  • suitable for heavy query loads.