Benchmarking RDF Query Engines: The LDBC Semantic Publishing Benchmark

The Linked Data paradigm which is now the prominent enabler for sharing huge volumes of data by means of Semantic Web technologies, has created novel challenges for non-relational data management technologies such as RDF and graph database systems. Benchmarking, which is an important factor in the development of research on RDF and graph data management technologies, must address these challenges. In this paper we present the Semantic Publishing Benchmark (SPB) developed in the context of the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) EU project. It is based on the scenario of the BBC media organisation which makes heavy use of Linked Data Technologies such as RDF and SPARQL. In SPB a large number of aggregation agents provide the heavy query workload, while at the same time a steady stream of editorial agents execute a number of update operations. In this paper we describe the benchmark’s schema, data generator, workload and report the results of experiments conducted using SPB for the Virtuoso and GraphDB RDF engines.