DSG Seminar Series • The QLever SPARQL Engine (and: how (not) to get practical work published)

Monday, September 19, 2022 10:30 am - 10:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker: Hannah Bast, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

(Talk virtually over zoom; note: talk will be recorded; please join here)

Abstract: 

QLever is a new SPARQL engine, which can search very large knowledge graphs (100 billion triples and more) efficiently with very moderate resources (a standard PC is enough). QLever features live autocompletion, a text search component, and support for difficult geographic queries and the interactive visualization of their results. Building such an engine from the ground up is a lot of work, but also very rewarding. I will give you a guided tour with many demos and various glimpses under the hood, with examples of clever algorithms, algorithm engineering, and modern C++. I will also talk about the meta topics of reproducibility and how (not) to get work of this kind published.

Bio: Hannah Bast started programming early in her live and loved mathematics, so studied mathematics and computer science and stumbled into a career in theoretical computer science. Reviewers liked her theoretical work, but she wasn't too happy with doing arts only for art's sake. She then regressed to more practical work again, which she likes a lot, but reviewers not so much. Since 2009, she is a full professor at the University of Freiburg. She was a dean, member of the AI commission of the German parliament, and worked at Google, creating a new route planner for Google Maps. She enjoys life despite its absurdity.

Talk video