Jelly: a Fast and Convenient RDF Serialization Format

TL;DR

Jelly is a new binary RDF serialization format designed for high performance, efficient compression, and support for streaming, improving upon existing formats like Turtle and JSON-LD for knowledge graph applications.

Contribution

Jelly introduces a fast, binary RDF serialization format built on Protocol Buffers, with open-source implementations and support for both batch and streaming use cases.

Findings

Maximizes serialization throughput

Reduces file size with lightweight streaming compression

Supports both batch and streaming RDF data efficiently

Abstract

Existing RDF serialization formats such as Turtle, N-Quads, and JSON-LD are widely used for communication and storage in knowledge graph and Semantic Web applications. However, they suffer from limitations in performance, compression ratio, and lack of native support for RDF streams. To address these shortcomings, we introduce Jelly, a fast and convenient binary serialization format for RDF data that supports both batch and streaming use cases. Jelly is designed to maximize serialization throughput, reduce file size with lightweight streaming compression, and minimize compute resource usage. Built on Protocol Buffers, Jelly is easy to integrate with modern programming languages and RDF libraries. To maximize reusability, Jelly has an open protocol specification, open-source implementations in Java and Python integrated with popular RDF libraries, and a versatile command-line tool. To illustrate its usefulness, we outline concrete use cases where Jelly can provide tangible benefits. We consider that by combining practical usability with state-of-the-art efficiency, Jelly is an important contribution to the Semantic Web tool stack.