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Linked Data Fragments Server

On today's Web, Linked Data is published in different ways, which include data dumps, subject pages, and results of SPARQL queries. We call each such part a Linked Data Fragment.

The issue with the current Linked Data Fragments is that they are either so powerful that their servers suffer from low availability rates (as is the case with SPARQL), or either don't allow efficient querying.

Instead, this server offers Triple Pattern Fragments. Each Triple Pattern Fragment offers:

  • data that corresponds to a triple pattern (example).
  • metadata that consists of the (approximate) total triple count (example).
  • controls that lead to all other fragments of the same dataset (example).

An example server is available at data.linkeddatafragments.org.

Install the server

This server requires Node.js 0.10 or higher and is tested on OSX and Linux. To install, execute:

$ [sudo] npm install -g ldf-server

Use the server

Configure the data sources

First, create a configuration file config.json similar to config-example.json, in which you detail your data sources. For example, this configuration uses an HDT file and a SPARQL endpoint as sources:

{
  "title": "My Linked Data Fragments server",
  "datasources": {
    "dbpedia": {
      "title": "DBpedia 2014",
      "type": "HdtDatasource",
      "description": "DBpedia 2014 with an HDT back-end",
      "settings": { "file": "data/dbpedia2014.hdt" }
    },
    "dbpedia-sparql": {
      "title": "DBpedia 3.9 (Virtuoso)",
      "type": "SparqlDatasource",
      "description": "DBpedia 3.9 with a Virtuoso back-end",
      "settings": { "endpoint": "http://dbpedia.restdesc.org/", "defaultGraph": "http://dbpedia.org" }
    }
  }
}

The following sources are supported out of the box:

Support for new sources is possible by implementing the Datasource interface.

Memento

The Linked Data Fragments server supports the Memento Protocol. If your linked data source evolve over time and has multiple versions, Memento makes it straightforward to access and query across the various versions. For instance, the Memento DbPedia LDF Server supports about 10 versions of DbPedia starting from 2007. A Memento Client like Memento for Chrome can be used to navigate the versions in a browser. The command line utility, cUrl, can also be used to see Memento in action. The following example queries the Memento LDF TimeGate to retrieve a Memento of the English DbPedia page around 15 March 2015.

curl -IL -H "Accept-Datetime: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT" http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/timegate/http://dbpedia.org/page/English

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 21:07:08 GMT
Location: http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/memento/20150415000000/http://dbpedia.org/page/English
Vary: accept-datetime
Link: <http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="original",<http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/timemap/link/http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="timemap"; type="application/link-format",<http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/memento/20150415000000/http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="memento"; datetime="Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 21:07:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Link: <http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="original", <http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/memento/20150415000000/http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="memento"; datetime="Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT", <http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/timegate/http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="timegate", <http://dbpedia.mementodepot.org/timemap/link/http://dbpedia.org/page/English>; rel="timemap"
Memento-Datetime: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Memento configuration

To enable Memento support, a new section called timegates must be added to the config.json file along with information about the versions in the datasources section.

The timegates section lists all the versions, called memento, of a data source. The LDF server uses this information to connect a particular data source with its versions, and also to build the appropriate Memento URL for the versions.

For example, the timegates section below shows 2 versions of DbPedia:

"timegates": {
  "baseURL": "/timegate/",
  "mementos": {
    "dbpedia": {
      "versions": [
        "dbpedia_2015",
        "dbpedia_2014"
      ]
    }
  }
}

For these 2 versions, the datasources section of the config looks like:

"datasources": {
  "dbpedia": {
    "title":       "DBpedia 2015",
    "description": "DBpedia 2015 with an HDT back-end",
    "type":        "HdtDatasource",
    "settings":    {
      "file": "/data1/dbpedia/cdata_2015.hdt"
    },
    "timegate": true
  },
  "dbpedia_2015": {
    "title":       "DBpedia v2015",
    "description": "DBpedia v2015 with an HDT back-end",
    "type":        "HdtDatasource",
    "settings":    {
      "file": "/data1/dbpedia/cdata_2015.hdt"
    },
    "memento": {
      "interval": ["2015-04-15T00:00:00Z", "2014-09-14T11:59:59Z"]
    }
  },
  "dbpedia_2014": {
    "title":       "DBpedia v2014",
    "description": "DBpedia v2014 with an HDT back-end",
    "type":        "HdtDatasource",
    "settings":    {
      "file": "/data1/dbpedia/cdata_2014.hdt"
    },
    "memento": {
      "interval": ["2014-09-15T00:00:00Z", "2013-06-15T11:59:59Z"]
    }
  }

The first datasource named dbpedia is the current version or in Memento terms, the Original. This datasource has a parameter called timegate: true which indicates to the LDF server that there are mementos available to this datasource. The LDF server will then use the information provided in the timegates section to build the approriate Memento responses.

The datasources dbpedia_2015 and dbpedia_2014 contains information about the data source and also information about the time interval this version was active in the memento section. The time interval must be in ISO 8601 format.

Start the server

After creating a configuration file, execute

$ ldf-server config.json 5000 4

Here, 5000 is the HTTP port on which the server will listen, and 4 the number of worker processes.

Now visit http://localhost:5000/ in your browser.

Reload running server

You can reload the server without any downtime in order to load a new configuration or version.
In order to do this, you need the process ID of the server master process.
One possibility to obtain this are the server logs:

$ bin/ldf-server config.json
Master 28106 running.
Worker 28107 running on http://localhost:3000/.

If you send the server a SIGHUP signal:

$ kill -s SIGHUP 28106

it will reload by replacing its workers.

Note that crashed or killed workers are always replaced automatically.

(Optional) Set up a reverse proxy

A typical Linked Data Fragments server will be exposed on a public domain or subdomain along with other applications. Therefore, you need to configure the server to run behind an HTTP reverse proxy.
To set this up, configure the server's public URL in your server's config.json:

{
  "title": "My Linked Data Fragments server",
  "baseURL": "http://data.example.org/",
  "datasources": { … }
}

Then configure your reverse proxy to pass requests to your server. Here's an example for nginx:

server {
  server_name data.example.org;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000$request_uri;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_pass_header Server;
  }
}

Change the value 3000 into the port on which your Linked Data Fragments server runs.

If you would like to proxy the data in a subfolder such as http://example.org/my/data, modify the baseURL in your config.json to "http://example.org/my/data" and change location from / to /my/data (excluding a trailing slash).

License

The Linked Data Fragments server is written by Ruben Verborgh.

This code is copyrighted by iMinds – Ghent University and released under the MIT license.