Algebraix Data Corporation today announced its SPARQL Server(TM) RDF database successfully executed all 17 of its queries on the SP2 benchmark up to one billion triples on one computer node. The SP2 benchmark is the most computationally complex for testing SPARQL performance and no other vendor has reported results for all queries on data sizes above five million triples. Read more

Triplestores are Database Management Systems (DBMS) for data modeled using RDF. Unlike Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), which store data in relations (or tables) and are queried using SQL, triplestores store RDF triples and are queried using SPARQL.

A key feature of many triplestores is the ability to do inference. It is important to note that a DBMS typically offers the capacity to deal with concurrency, security, logging, recovery, and updates, in addition to loading and storing data. Not all Triplestores offer all these capabilities (yet).

Triplestore Implementations

Triplestores can be broadly classified in three types categories: Native triplestores, RDBMS-backed triplestores and NoSQL triplestores. Read more

A new article by Jesse Weaver corrects two misconceptions about the semantic web. The first is that the semantic web strives to create “one ontology to rule them all.” The article states, “To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that there should be ‘one ontology to rule them all.’ Instead, what is regularly promoted is ontology reuse and/or integration. For example, the FOAF ontology is widely used in the semantic web to describe persons; why create your own ontology when you can reuse a well-established one? Integration of ontologies allows for conciliation of perspectives, causing data that use these ontologies to become meaningfully related. Admittedly, there are some rather large, comprehensive ontologies out there, and there are some very popular and pervasive ones, too. However, there is no standard or recommendation that requires publishers of RDF data to comply with any particular ontology. You could even ignore the RDF vocabulary if you so please (yes, even rdf:type).” Read more

Mitchell Shults commented on the significance of Franz’s recent success loading one trillion triplestores. Shults writes, “Triplestores are perfect for making sense out of extremely complex data. However, a triplestore is only useful if massive quantities of information can be loaded, updated and effectively queried in a reasonable amount of time. That is why Franz Technology’s announcement is so interesting.” Read more

This resource from Michele Pasin is an excellent tool for Python developers. As Pasin puts it: “I’m reporting on a recent survey I made in the context of a Linked Data project I’m working on, SAILS. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a data model and language which is quickly gaining momentum in the open-data and data-integration worlds. In SAILS we’re developing a prototype for rdf-data manipulation and querying, but since the final application (of which the rdf-components is part of) will be written in Python and Django, in what follows I tried to gather information about all the existing libraries and frameworks for doing rdf-programming using python.” Read more