Development Update

Brian Stucky and I made a first pass at an online prototype back in mid-February. This prototype featured a text-file triple-store back-end, a bit of javascript, a cool modeling widget, and some JSP glue.

Since then, I've been working on a few things to make this prototype more solid:

1) Implementing a database back-end for the triple-store. I've been working with Virtuoso under an evaluation license and have found it fairly easy to work with. I would prefer a free or more open-source solution but it seems Virtuoso is the best product out there for our needs.

2) Building queries on REST services. Not wanting to make the REST services an after-though to our architecture, I am building the REST services into the our web prototype.

3) Re-building SPARQL queries to be more portable, scalable, and faster. Specifically, the transitive closure functions were previously built using specialized syntax not portable to larger systems. The new syntax is more portable and will be alot faster. E.g:

SELECT ?s ?dist FROM
WHERE
{
{
SELECT ?s ?o
WHERE
{
?s bsc:relatedTo ?o .
}
} OPTION (TRANSITIVE, t_distinct, t_in(?s), t_out(?o), t_min (1), t_max (20), t_step ('step_no') as ?dist) .
FILTER (?o= dwc:spec12345)
}

Hoping to get this new prototype online in the next week or two.