RDF graph summarization for first-sight structure discovery

To help users get familiar with large RDF graphs, RDF summarization techniques can be used. In this work, we study quotient summaries of RDF graphs, that is: graph summaries derived from a notion of equivalence among RDF graph nodes. We make the following contributions: (i) four novel summaries which are often small and easy-to-comprehend, in the style of E–R diagrams; (ii) efficient (amortized linear-time) algorithms for computing these summaries either from scratch, or incrementally, reflecting additions to the graph; (iii) the first formal study of the interplay between RDF graph saturation in the presence of an RDFS ontology, and summarization; we provide a sufficient condition for a highly efficient shortcut method to build the quotient summary of a graph without saturating it; (iv) formal results establishing the shortcut conditions for some of our summaries and others from the literature; (v) experimental validations of our claim within a tool available online.