S-RDF: A New RDF Serialization Format for Better Storage Without Losing Human Readability

Abstract

Nowadays, RDF data becomes more and more popular on the Web due to the advances of the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data initiatives. Several works are focused on transforming relational databases to RDF by storing related data in N-Triple serialization format. However, these approaches do not take into account the existing normalization of their databases since N-Triple format allows data redundancy and does not control any normalization by itself. Moreover, the mostly used and recommended serialization formats, such as RD-F/XML, Turtle, and HDT, have either high human-readability but waste storage capacity, or focus further on storage capacities while providing low human-readability. To overcome these limitations, we propose here a new serialization format, called S-RDF. By considering the structure (graph) and values of the RDF data separately, S-RDF reduces the duplicity of values by using unique identifiers. Results show an important improvement over the existing serialization formats in terms of storage (up to 71,66% w.r.t. N-Triples) and human readability.