DBpedia · Rate Limits

Dbpedia Rate Limits

DBpedia publishes explicit fair-use limits for the public SPARQL endpoint. The Lookup, Spotlight, and Live endpoints do not document specific rate limits but operate under a community fair-use expectation. Heavy usage is directed toward self-hosted deployments using Docker images and dataset downloads from the Databus.

Dbpedia Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for DBpedia on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 7 rate-limit definitions, measuring rows-per-query, seconds-per-query, concurrent-connections, and requests-per-second.

The profile also includes 3 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include SPARQL, Knowledge Graph, Linked Data, and Rate Limiting.

7 Limits Throttle: 429
SPARQLKnowledge GraphLinked DataRate Limiting

Limits

SPARQL Max Result Rows query
rows-per-query
10000
Queries returning more rows are silently truncated; response is HTTP 200.
SPARQL Query Timeout query
seconds-per-query
120
Timed-out queries return partial results with HTTP 200, not an error.
SPARQL Parallel Connections per IP ip
concurrent-connections
50
Applies to the public dbpedia.org/sparql endpoint.
SPARQL Request Rate per IP ip
requests-per-second
100
Sustained 100 req/sec; burst up to 120 req/sec allowed.
Lookup Service global
requests-per-second
unspecified
No documented limit; fair-use expected. Self-host via Docker for heavy workloads.
Spotlight Annotation global
requests-per-second
unspecified
No documented limit; fair-use expected. Self-host via Docker for heavy workloads.
DBpedia Live SPARQL global
requests-per-second
unspecified
No documented limit; real-time updates ~105 pages/minute processed.

Policies

Fair Use
DBpedia public endpoints are community resources. High-volume or continuous querying should be done against a local Virtuoso instance loaded with datasets from the Databus.
Result Truncation
Partial results are returned (HTTP 200) for queries exceeding the row limit or timeout. Always verify result set size and consider adding LIMIT clauses to SPARQL queries.
Self-Hosting Preference
Production applications are encouraged to download the DBpedia dataset from https://databus.dbpedia.org/ and run a local OpenLink Virtuoso instance.

Sources