Hashing the Hypertrie: Space- and Time-Efficient Indexing for SPARQL in Tensors

Time-efficient solutions for querying RDF knowledge graphs depend on indexing structures with low response times to answer SPARQL queries rapidly. Hypertries-an indexing structure we recently developed for tensor-based triple stores-have achieved significant runtime improvements over several mainstream storage solutions for RDF knowledge graphs. However, the space footprint of this novel data structure is still often larger than that of many mainstream solutions. In this work, we detail means to reduce the memory footprint of hypertries and thereby further speed up query processing in hypertrie-based RDF storage solutions. Our approach relies on three strategies: (1) the elimination of duplicate nodes via hashing, (2) the compression of non-branching paths, and (3) the storage of single-entry leaf nodes in their parent nodes. We evaluate these strategies by comparing them with baseline hypertries as well as popular triple stores such as Virtuoso, Fuseki, GraphDB, Blazegraph and gStore. We rely on four datasets/benchmark generators in our evaluation: SWDF, DBpedia, WatDiv, and WildData. Our results suggest that our modifications significantly reduce the memory footprint of hypertries by up to 70% while leading to a relative improvement of up to 39% with respect to average Queries per Second and up to 740% with respect to Query Mixes per Hour.