How to generate fragments out of your own triples

There are three kinds of fragments in gAnswer: entity fragments, predicate fragments and type fragments. They are information extracted from the triples helping gAnswer improve its results. In this section we will show you how to generate your own fragments step by step with a simple example

Step 1: Clean the triple files

Suppose we have a triple file containing only seven triples:

<StudentA>  <major>  <computer_science>
<StudentB>  <friend_of> <StudentA>
<StudentB>  <deskmate_of> <StudentA>
<StudentA>  <name>  "Jeff"
<StudentB>  <name>  "Tom"
<StudentA>  <type>   <Person>
<StudentB>  <type>   <Person>
<computer_science>  <type>  <Subject>

Generally speaking, there are three segment This is the exactly form of triples we need to generate fragments. However sometimes the entity and predicate contain some extra information. Take dbpedia dataset as an example. The following is the original form of a dbpedia triple

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alabama> <http://dbpedia.org/property/demonym> <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Adjectivals_and_demonyms_for_U.S._states> .

As you can see, every entity and predicate is marked with an URI, but we don't need the prefix of the URIs. See Step1_clean_triples.py. That is the code we use to clean dbpedia triples. Generally, please remember that making sure the entity and predicate names are clear enough to indicate their true meaning and contain no extra information is all you need to do in this step. By the way, if you have more than one triple files, please combine them into one so that the following steps will be easier.

Step 2: remove duplicate triples

One triple may occur more than once in the clean triple file, especially when you combine many triple files into one. gAnswer is OK with receiving duplicate triples but it will influence its performance.

Step 3: extract entity, predicate and type name for id allocation

To save space cost, the fragment files are not constructed based on entity, predicate and type names themselves but their ids. Therefore, we must extract every entity, predicate and type name out of the triple file and give them a uniue id respectively. In our example,the id files will goes like this:

//Entity ids
<StudentA>  1
<StudentB>  2
<computer_science>  3

//predicate ids
<major> 1
<friend_of> 2
<type>  3
<name>  4
<deskmate_of> 5

//type ids
<Person>  1
<Subject> 2

Step 4: represent triples with ids

For convenience, before we generate the fragments, we first replace all the name strings in triple file with corresponding ids. In our example, the new triple file is like:

1 1 3
2 2 1
1 4 -1
2 4 -1
1 3 1
2 3 1
3 3 2

Notice that we use -1 to represent values that a not entity nor type, such as numbers and literals.

Step 5: generate entity fragments

Finally we are going to generate entity fragments now. Every entity has its own piece of fragment.Fragments are information about the edges related with the entity as well as its neighbor entities.First let's clearify the idea of subject and object in a triple. A triple consist of three parts: subject, predicate and object. For example:

<StudentA>  <major>  <computer_science>

Here studentA is subject, major is predicate and computer_science is object. Basically, the first element is subject, the second is predicate and the third is object. Sometimes it is the object, not an entity nor type. Value like number and string can also become object.

We define 5 kinds of edges: 1.InEntEdge: The entity is the object of the edge and the subject is also an entity. 2.OutEntEdge: The entity is the subject of the edge and the object is also an entity. 3.InEdge: The entity is the object of the edge. 4.OutEdge: The entity is the subject of the edge. 5.typeEdge: The entity ts the subject of the edge whose predicate is type and its object is a type.

Therefore, the structure of a piece of entity fragment is as follow:

<entity id> <InEntEdge list> | <OutEntEdge list> | <InEdge list> | <OutEdge list> | <Type list>

Between entity id and InEntEdge list, there should be a \t as divider.

InEntEdge list and OutEntEdge list should be:

<Subject or object entity id 1> : <Predicate id 1.1> ; <Predicate id 1.2> ; ...... , <Subject or object entity id 2> : <Predicate id 2.1> ; <Predicate id 2.2> ; ......

InEdge, OutEdge and Type list is similar but simpler.

<Subject or object entity or type id 1> , <Subject or object entity or type id 2>, <Subject or object entity or type id 3>......

Let's go back to our example. For entity studentA, its entity fragment should be:

1   2:2;5 | 3:1 | 2 | 1,4 | 1 

The id of studentA is 1. So at the beginning of the entity fragment we have a 1. Then we find InEntEdge, OutEntEdge, InEdge, OutEdge and Type list one by one and add them to the entity fragment.

Step 6: Generate type fragment

Given a specific type, type fragment contains three kinds of information: predicate ids in an InEdge of an entity of this type, predicate ids in an OutEdge of an entity of this type, and all the ids of entity of this type. The structure should be:

<Type id> <InEdge predicate list> | <OutEdge predicate list> | <Entity list>

In our example, the type fragement of Person should be:

1 2,5 | 1,4 | 1,2

Step 7: Generate predicate fragment

Given a specific predicate, there will be more than one piece of predicate fragment. Every piece of predicate fragment comes from a piece triple. We record the types that a predicate may accept as subject or object. Sometimes the object is not an entity and we use literal to denote this situation. The structure of a piece of predicate fragment is:

[<Type list of the subject entity>] <predicate id>  [<Type list of the object entity> or "literal"]

For predicate friend_of, the predicate fragment should be:

[1] 2 [1]

For predicate name, the predicate fragment should be:

[1] 4 literal

Please notice that between type lists, predicate id and "literal", \t should be the divider.

Step 8: Rebuild the lucene fragment for entity fragment and type short name

This is the final step to make gAnswer run on our new data fragments. You can find the relative code under src/lcn/BuildIndexForEntityFragments.java and src/lucene/BuildIndexForTypeShortName.java. All you need to do is to import the project into eclipse and modify the file paths in the relative code and then run the main function in src/lcn/BuildIndexForEntityFragments.java and src/lucene/BuildIndexForTypeShortName.java.