Driven by initiatives like Schema.org, the amount of semantically annotated data is expected to grow steadily towards massive scale, requiring cluster-based solutions to query it. At the same time, Hadoop has become dominant in the area of Big Data processing with large infrastructures being already deployed and used in manifold application fields. For Hadoop-based applications, a common data pool (HDFS) provides many synergy benefits, making it very attractive to use these infrastructures for

more »

... emantic data processing as well. Indeed, existing SPARQL-on-Hadoop (MapReduce) approaches have already demonstrated very good scalability, however, query runtimes are rather slow due to the underlying batch processing framework. While this is acceptable for data-intensive queries, it is not satisfactory for the majority of SPARQL queries that are typically much more selective requiring only small subsets of the data. In this paper, we present Sempala, a SPARQL-over-SQL-on-Hadoop approach designed with selective queries in mind. Our evaluation shows performance improvements by an order of magnitude compared to existing approaches, paving the way for interactive-time SPARQL query processing on Hadoop.