SPARQLy: An RDF Store For Regularly Structured Data

DreamWorks Animation Computer Science, 2009-10

Liaison(s): Drew Perttula, Michael Seales, Nathan Wilson (F), Gregg Carrier (S), Doug Sherman, Abby Thompson
Advisor(s): Chris Stone
Students(s): Joshua Durgin, Zvi Effron, Joshua Swanson (PM), Steven Watanabe

DreamWorks Animation represents some of its working information about movies, scenes, etc. into an RDF (Resource Description Framework) store. RDF is more flexible than conventional relational databases, maintain an unstructured and constantly changing web of relationships between pieces of data. This lack of structure means that searching RDF can be slow. The team has developed an RDF store optimized for subsets of data where the structure is stable and well-defined (for instance, every scene is part of exactly one movie).