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turtle
Advisor
Advisor

Currently I'm involved in a project exploring the semantic technologies for providing situation and context awareness services for future human computer interfaces. We decided to use a graph-based approach for storing the user's situation and exploit Linked Data [1] principles to collect related information from different sources to derive recommendations for user assistance. Unfortunately SAP does not have


With HANA, SAP provides a fast and scalable data layer based on innovative column-based, in-memory storage and query engines. So the question was, whether this new technology can be utilized for implementing W3C Semantic Web [2] technologies, such as RDF store, SPARQL [3] efficiently. Many vendors use relational databases for their SPARQL implementations or provide the possibility to use relational databases as storage backend. So I spend some time on the problem of using HANA as an RDF triple store and implementing a SPARQL endpoint for querying graph data in HANA. What came out of this activity is a proof-of-concept implementation of SPARQL 1.1 in pure JavaScript (node.js [4] ), which translates SPARQL statements into HANA SQL and SQLScript functions and executes these queries on a HANA instance. Although concrete performance measuring and comparison was not yet done, the results are very promising and we use the system for our project now.

Besides the performance aspect we discovered a few other benefits, which come with HANA. So for example, it is possible to define HANA SQL Views to directly access the enterprise data within SPARQL queries and such provide a graph view on enterprise data. No replication of data into a special triple store is necessary. Furthermore, together with the Virtual Data Model or CDS these views can also be created automatically.

Sample query of a business object "PurchaseOrder"

The full-text search and text analysis features of HANA can be integrated into the SPARQL processor. For example we implemented a built-in RDF property , which uses the HANA contains [5] predicate for fuzzy search.

Finally, another interesting possibility comes with HANA Virtual Tables, which refer to tables on a different (remote) HANA databases. This feature allows to implement graphs spanning multiple databases and execute federated queries.


We are now using and improving the HANA SPARQL extension in the context of speciifc internal projects. The semanticweb.com Website lists a number of industry verticals [6]. So I'm wondering if there is a demand for having RDF/SPARQL support for HANA inside the SAP community.

[1] Linked data - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Data - W3C, http://linkeddata.org/

[2] Semantic Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] SPARQL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and SPARQL 1.1 Overview

[4] node.js

[5] The CONTAINS() Predicate - SAP HANA Fuzzy Search Reference - SAP Library

[6] http://semanticweb.com/catagory/industry-verticals

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