Angelos Charalambidis and myself represented Semagrow at the Federated Querying Workshop organized by iMinds in Gent on November 13th. The workshop brought together several researchers working on federated querying, aiming to coalesce them into a community. Towards this end, workshop participants decided to initiate the RDF Query Processing discussion forum and to try to establish a regular series of workshops.
A major topic discussed on that day was benchmarking and FedBench: despite the catalytic role that the latter has played in federated querying research, the seems to be consensus that a new benchmark is needed.
Another topic was issues associated with federating data sources that support extensions of the core SPARQL specification, such as the spatio-temporal geoSPARQL and stSPARQL extensions. And, more ambitiously, how to federate data stores that support a different, but apparently compatible, syntax such as Cassandra CQL.
