Passage: Ensuring Completeness and Responsiveness of Public SPARQL Endpoints with SPARQL Continuation Queries

Being able to query online public knowledge graphs such as Wikidata or DBpedia is extremely valuable. However, these queries can be interrupted due to the fair use policies enforced by SPARQL endpoint providers, leading to incomplete results. While these policies help maintain the responsiveness of public SPARQL endpoints, they compromise the completeness of query results, which limits the feasibility of various downstream tasks. Ideally, we should not have to choose between completeness and responsiveness. To address this issue, we introduce and formalize the concept of SPARQL continuation queries. When a SPARQL endpoint interrupts a query, it returns partial results along with a SPARQL continuation query to retrieve the remaining results. If the continuation query is also interrupted, the process repeats, generating further continuation queries until the complete results are obtained. In our experimentation, we show that our continuation server passage ensures completeness and responsiveness while delivering high performance.