Towards a Commons RDF Library - ApacheCon Europe 2014

Towards a Commons RDF

LibrarySergio Fernández, Andy Seaborne and Peter Ansell

http://commons-rdf.github.io

Who are we?

Sergio Fernández• Senior Researcher at Salzburg Research• Partner Technology Manager at Redlink GmbH• ASF Committer of Marmotta and Stanbol

Andy Seaborne• Senior Architect at Epimorphics Ltd• ASF participant on W3C SPARQL-WG, RDF-WG• ASF Committer of Jena

Peter Ansell• Researcher at CSIRO• Developer of OpenRDF Sesame• ASF Committer of Marmotta and Any23

Commons RDF, why?

• Historical incompatibility in Java• Not providing yet-another-wrapper

• But providing common interfaces• It arrives in the right time for design of:

• Apache Jena 3.0• OpenRDF Sesame 4.0

• But it will live or die on its own merits!

Motivations

• Avoid propagation of internal implementation decisions• Typically now when any API decides either Jena or

Sesame, it immediately forces you to follow the same implementation decision

• Simple common interfaces would solve most of the use cases

• In the end you should be, a bit more, free to choose

Use Cases

• Non-captive client libraries• MICO API: http://www.mico-project.eu/commons-rdf/

• Redlink SDK: http://dev.redlink.io/sdk#java

• Generic SPARQL Client

• Portable in-memory RDF model/graph

• Move RDF to other worlds (e.g., Hadoop)

• ...whatever it could come

Current features: version 0.0.2

• A type-safe, non-general API that covers RDF 1.1

• Initially focused on core concepts:• IRI, Blank Node, Literal, Triple, and Graph

• In a future other aspects may be also included• datasets, query, etc.

Developers, we need you!

what other interfaces

are desired by

developers?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/6300175460

Design by (git) committee

Next steps and discussion

• Bootstrap the implementations on each toolkit

• Evolve the current design• Get feedback from the community• Currently working at GitHub, although at

some point we could move to Apache Commons or any suitable organization

Discussion Panel

thanks!

available under CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0

International License

http://commons-rdf.github.io

acknowledgments to MICO FP7 project (grant no. 610480)