FEDERATION
Ephedra federation engine
Hybrid federation services over heterogeneous data sources
Ephedra
How does it work?
Transparent processing of hybrid queries
With metaphactory, users can express custom service requests as part of SPARQL queries. Custom services are integrated as data sources and hybrid SPARQL queries are optimized to be executed efficiently. Ephedra defines a common implementation interface, in which interactions with external services are encapsulated in an RDF4J SAIL module. In this way, a custom compute service, for example, can be registered in the repository manager as yet another SPARQL repository and referenced inside SERVICE clauses in SPARQL queries. SPARQL graph patterns specified inside such SERVICE clauses are parsed to extract input parameters for a service call, as well as the variables to bind the results returned by the service. The Ephedra SPARQL query execution strategy sends the sub-clauses of a query to corresponding data sources, gathers partial results, combines them using union and join operations, and produces result sets.
Application Areas
Engineering & Manufacturing
At Siemens, the Ephedra engine enables the transparent integration of the intenal knowledge graph with the dynamic data produced by the API services available in the infrastructure, and with analysis results produced by machine learning algorithms. By supporting hybrid data integration and querying, metaphactory allows for building several distinct knowledge graph applications targeting different user groups, and supports several practical end-user scenarios within the Siemens infrastructure. Examples include gas turbine diagnostics and maintenance, and building automation and Digital Twin creation.
Pharma & Life Sciences
In the pharmaceutics domain, metaphactory and the Ephedra engine allow domain experts to augment internal knowledge graphs containing, e.g., interlinked data about genes, proteins, and associated diseases, with additional relevant private or public data sources (e.g., Wikidata and Nextprot) and domain-specific services (e.g., KNIME or BLAST). Users can then use full-text indices to perform custom keyword search in addition to the SPARQL structured search.
Open Data
The applications below showcase the power of the metaphactory platform and the Ephedra federation engine in the open data domain:
» A map combining data about the population density in particular regions and the coordinates of these regions » Go to app »
» A map combining data about the entities located within a particular administrative entity and the coordinates of these entities » Go to app »
» An application that allows users to search for entities similar to a given entity, where the similarity is provided by an ML-based model » Go to app »
Learn more about Ephedra
metaphactory: A Platform for Knowledge Graph Management
Combining RDF Graph Data and Embedding Models for an Augmented Knowledge Graph
Ephedra: efficiently combining RDF data and services using SPARQL federation
Ephedra: SPARQL federation over RDF data and services
