Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Computer Science

Advisor

Abdullah Uz Tansel

Committee Members

Sarah Zelikovitz

Susan P. Imberman

Wlodek Zadrozny

Subject Categories

Data Storage Systems

Keywords

Semantic Web, Temporal Database, RDF

Abstract

The Internet is not only a platform for communication, transactions, and cloud storage, but it is also a large knowledge store where people as well as machines can create, manipulate, infer, and make use of data and knowledge. The Semantic Web was developed for this purpose. It aims to help machines understand the meaning of data and knowledge so that machines can use the data and knowledge in decision making. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) forms the foundation of the Semantic Web which is organized as the Semantic Web Layer Cake. RDF is limited and can only express a binary relationship with the format of . However, expressing higher order relationships requires reification which is very cumbersome. Naturally, time varying data is very common and cannot be represented by only binary relationships. We first surveyed approaches that use reification or extend RDF for higher order relationships. Then we proposed a new data model, BiTemporal RDF (BiTRDF), that incorporates both valid time and transaction time explicitly into standard RDF resources. We defined the BiTRDF model with its elements, vocabulary, semantics, and entailment, and the BiTemporal SPARQL (BiT-SPARQL) query language. We discussed the foundation for implementing BiTRDF and we also explored different approaches to implement the BiTRDF model. We concluded this thesis with potential research directions. This thesis lays the foundation for a new approach to easily embed any or more dimensions, such as temporal data, spatial data, probabilistic data, confidence levels, etc.

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