Decentralizing the Persistence and Querying of RDF Datasets Through Browser-Based Technologies

Even though linked open data are inherently capable of persisting in a decentralized fashion, the Semantic Web community is currently lacking effective workflows for seamlessly sharing and querying RDF datasets beyond relatively small scales. The most accessible methods for cloning and subsequently querying an RDF dataset are quite involved, often requiring users to locate and download a data dump, install and run a local SPARQL engine, load data into the triplestore, and then query their endpoint using some interface. While these actions may qualify as the first step towards decentralization, the incentive for such a user to then make their local endpoint available to the World Wide Web and thus act as an auxiliary host or ‘mirror’ is hard to surmise. In this paper, we present a browser-based RDF query engine coupled with web-based peer-to-peer networks to illustrate the decentralized persistence and use of RDF datasets via intelligent peers.