Context

The Semantic Web (Shadbolt, Hall et Berners-Lee, 2006) is an extension of the "classical" Web, in which data (and not only documents) can be published, shared, and link to other data. The semantics of these data is described by knowledge models (rules, ontologies) allowing to reason about the data, and to infer new knowledge.

Sophia is a (work in progress) implementation of the Semantic Web principles for the Rust programming language. This language emphasizes performance and reliability, making it a good candidate for developing, e.g., distributed services or embedded systems (smart objects). One of Sophia's goals is to open those applications to the Semantic Web.

Inferray (Subercaze et al. 2016) is an inference engine for the Semantic Web, developed in Java. Inferray's originality is the memory layout it uses for storing the data on which it reasons, which is compact and allows very efficient reasoning.

Goal

The goal of the internship is to implement in Sophia the memory layout and inference mechanisms used by Inferray. We will then evaluate:

• the benefit brought by these changes to the current implementation of Sophia, and
• the benefit of implementing them in Rust compared to Java.

Applicant

This position is available to students in 1st or 2nd year of Master. Former knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, on the one hand, and the Rust language, on the other hand, would be a bonus, but is not strictly required.

Contact :

• Pierre-Antoine Champin (pierre dash antoine dot champin at liris dot cnrs dot fr)
• Frédérique Laforest (frederique dot laforest at liris dot cnrs dot fr)
• Lionel Médini (lionel dot medini at liris dot cnrs dot fr)

References

Shadbolt, N., Hall, W. and Berners-Lee, T. (2006) ‘The semantic web revisited’, Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 21(3), pp. 96–101. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262614/1/Semantic_Web_Revisted.pdf

Subercaze, J. et al. (2016) ‘Inferray: fast in-memory RDF inference’, Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 9(6), pp. 468–479. http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol9/p468-subercaze.pdf