A Decentralized Architecture for Sharing and Querying Semantic Data

Although the Semantic Web in principle provides access to a vast Web of interlinked data, the full potential remains mostly unexploited. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the architecture of the current Web of Data relies on a set of servers providing access to the data. These servers represent bottlenecks and single points of failure that result in instability and unavailability of data at certain points in time. In this paper, we therefore propose a decentralized architecture (Piqnic) for sharing and querying semantic data. By combining both client and server functionality at each participating node, and introducing replication, Piqnic avoids bottlenecks and keeps datasets available and queryable although the original source might not be available. Our experimental results, using a standard benchmark of real datasets, show that Piqnic can serve as an architecture for sharing and querying semantic data, even in the presence of node failures.