The Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) is reaching a milestone today, June 23 2014, in announcing that two of the benchmarks that it has been developing since 1.5 years have now reached the status of Public Draft. This concerns the Semantic Publishing Benchmark (SPB) and the interactive workload of the Social Network Benchmark (SNB). In case of LDBC, the release is staged: now the benchmark software just runs read-only queries. This will be expanded in a few weeks with a mix of read- and insert-queries. Also, query validation will be added later. Watch this blog for the announcements to come, as this will be a matter of weeks to add.
The Public Draft stage means that the initial software (data generator, query driver) work and an initial technical specification and documentation has been written. In other words, there is a testable version of the benchmark available for anyone who is interested. Public Draft status does not mean that the benchmark has been adopted yet, it rather means that LDBC has come closer to adopting them, but is now soliciting feedback from the users. The benchmarks will remain in this stage at least until October 6. On that date, LDBC is organizing its fifth Technical User Community meeting. One of the themes for that meeting is collecting user feedback on the Public Drafts; which input will be used to either further evolve the benchmarks, or adopt them.
You can also see that we created a this new website and a new logo. This website is different from http://ldbc.eu that describes the EU project which kick-starts LDBC. The ldbcouncil.org is a website maintained by the Linked Data Benchmark Council legal entity, which will live on after the EU project stops (in less than a year). The Linked Data Benchmark Council is an independent, impartial, member-sustained organization dedicated to the creation of RDF and graph data management benchmarks and benchmark practices.
In the next weeks, you will see many contributors in LDBC post items on this blog. Some of these blog entries will be very technical, others not, but all aim to explain what LDBC is doing for RDF and graph benchmarking, and why.