IOS Press, Semantic Web: Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, 5(7), p. 493-518, 2016
DOI: 10.3233/sw-150186
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The Web of Data has grown enormously over the last years. Currently, it comprises a large compendium of interlinked and distributed datasets from multiple domains. The abundance of datasets has motivated considerable work for developing SPARQL query federation systems, the dedicated means to access data distributed over the Web of Data. However, the granularity of previous evaluations of such systems has not allowed deriving of insights concerning their behavior in different steps involved during federated query processing. In this work, we perform extensive experiments to compare state-of-the-art SPARQL endpoint federation systems using the comprehensive performance evaluation framework FedBench. In addition to considering the tradition query runtime as an evaluation criterion, we extend the scope of our performance evaluation by considering criteria, which have not been paid much attention to in previous studies. In particular, we consider the number of sources selected, the total number of SPARQL ASK requests used, the completeness of answers as well as the source selection time. Yet, we show that they have a significant impact on the overall query runtime of existing systems. Moreover, we extend FedBench to mirror a highly distributed data environment and assess the behavior of existing systems by using the same four criteria. As the result we provide a detailed analysis of the experimental outcomes that reveal novel insights for improving current and future SPARQL federation systems.