Answering queries over a federation of SPARQL endpoints requires combining data from more than one data source. Optimizing queries in such scenarios is particularly challenging not only because of (i) the large variety of possible query execution plans that correctly answer the query but also because (ii) there is only limited access to statistics about schema and instance data of remote sources. To overcome these challenges, most federated query engines rely on heuristics to reduce the space of possible query execution plans or on dynamic programming strategies to produce optimal plans. Nevertheless, these plans may still exhibit a high number of intermediate results or high execution times because of heuristics and inaccurate cost estimations. In this paper, we present Odyssey, an approach that uses statistics that allow for a more accurate cost estimation for federated queries and therefore enables Odyssey to produce better query execution plans. Our experimental results show that Odyssey produces query execution plans that are better in terms of data transfer and execution time than state-of-the-art optimizers. Our experiments using the FedBench benchmark show execution time gains of at least 25 times on average.
Processing SPARQL queries involves the construction of an efficient query plan to guide query execution. Alternative plans can vary in the resources and the amount of time that they need by orders of magnitude, making planning crucial for efficiency. On the other hand, the construction of optimal plans can become computationally intensive and it also operates upon detailed, difficult to obtain, metadata. In this paper we present Semagrow, a federated SPARQL querying system that uses metadata about the federated data sources in order to optimize query execution. We balance between a query optimizer that introduces little overhead, has appropriate fall backs in the absence of metadata, but at the same time produces optimal plans in as many situations as possible. Semagrow also exploits non-blocking and asynchronous stream processing technologies to achieve query execution efficiency and robustness. We also present and analyse empirical results using the FedBench benchmark to compare Semagrow against FedX and SPLENDID. Semagrow clearly outperforms SPLENDID and it is either on a par or much faster than FedX.  In order to leverage the full potential of the Semantic Web it is necessary to transparently query distributed RDF data sources in the same way as it has been possible with federated databases for ages. However, there are significant differences between the Web of (linked) Data and the traditional database approaches. Hence, it is not straightforward to adapt successful database techniques for RDF federation. Reasons are the missing cooperation between SPARQL end-points and the need for detailed data statistics for estimating the costs of query execution plans. We have implemented SPLENDID, a query optimization strategy for federating SPARQL endpoints based on statistical data obtained from voiD descriptions. Accurate cardinality estimates are essential for a successful query optimization. This is not only true for relational DBMSs but also for RDF stores. An RDF database consists of a set of triples and, hence, can be seen as a relational database with a single table with three attributes. This makes RDF rather special in that queries typically contain many self joins. We show that relational DBMSs are not well-prepared to perform cardinality estimation in this context. Further, there are hardly any special cardinality estimation methods for RDF databases. To overcome this lack of appropriate cardinality estimation methods, we introduce characteristic sets together with new cardinality estimation methods based upon them. We then show experimentally that the new methods are-in the RDF context-highly superior to the estimation methods employed by commercial DBMSs and by the open-source RDF store RDF-3X. The inherent flexibility of the RDF data model has led to its notable adoption in many domains, especially in the area of life-sciences. Some of these domains have an emerging need to access data integrated from various distributed sources of information. It is not always possible to implement this by simply loading all data into one central RDF store. For example, in the context of inter-institutional collaboration for drug development and clinical research participants often want to maintain control over their local databases. Alternatively, distributed query processing techniques can be utilized to evaluate queries by accessing the remote data sources only on demand and in conformance with local authorization models. In this paper we present an efficient approach to distributed query processing for large autonomous RDF databases. The groundwork is laid by a comprehensive RDF-specific schema- and instance-level synopsis. We present an optimizer that is able to utilize this synopsis to generate compact execution plans by precisely determining, at compile-time, those sources that are relevant to a query. Furthermore we present a tightly integrated query engine that is able to further reduce the volume of intermediate results at run-time. An extensive evaluation shows that our approach improves query execution times by up to two and transferred data volumes by up to three orders of magnitude compared to a naive implementation. Hundreds of public SPARQL endpoints have been deployed on the Web, forming a novel decentralised infrastructure for querying billions of structured facts from a variety of sources on a plethora of topics. But is this infrastructure mature enough to support applications? For 427 public SPARQL endpoints registered on the DataHub, we conduct various experiments to test their maturity. Regarding discoverability, we find that only one-third of endpoints make descriptive meta-data available, making it difficult to locate or learn about their content and capabilities. Regarding interoperability, we find patchy support for established SPARQL features like ORDER BY as well as (understandably) for new SPARQL 1.1 features. Regarding efficiency, we show that the performance of endpoints for generic queries can vary by up to 34 orders of magnitude. Regarding availability, based on a 27-month long monitoring experiment, we show that only 32.2 of public endpoints can be expected to have (monthly) "two-nines" uptimes of 99100 . To increase performance, data sharing platforms often make use of clusters of nodes where certain tasks can be executed in parallel. Resource planning and especially deciding how many processors should be chosen to exploit parallel processing is complex in such a setup as increasing the number of processors does not always improve runtime due to communication overhead. Instead, there is usually an optimum number of processors for which using more or fewer processors leads to less efficient runtimes. In this paper, we present a cost model based on widely used statistics (VoiD) and show how to compute the optimum number of processors that should be used to evaluate a particular SPARQL query over a particular configuration and RDF dataset. Our first experiments show the general applicability of our approach but also how shortcomings in the used statistics limit the potential of optimization. Typical approaches for querying structured Web Data collect (crawl) and pre-process (index) large amounts of data in a central data repository before allowing for query answering. However, this time-consuming pre-processing phase however leverages the benefits of Linked Data -- where structured data is accessible live and up-to-date at distributed Web resources that may change constantly -- only to a limited degree, as query results can never be current. An ideal query answering system for Linked Data should return current answers in a reasonable amount of time, even on corpora as large as the Web. Query processors evaluating queries directly on the live sources require knowledge of the contents of data sources. In this paper, we develop and evaluate an approximate index structure summarising graph-structured content of sources adhering to Linked Data principles, provide an algorithm for answering conjunctive queries over Linked Data on theWeb exploiting the source summary, and evaluate the system using synthetically generated queries. The experimental results show that our lightweight index structure enables complete and up-to-date query results over Linked Data, while keeping the overhead for querying low and providing a satisfying source ranking at no additional cost.