Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

TopQuadrant, the developer of the TopBraid Composer Maestro ontology modeling tool and TopBraid Live, the semantic application development platform, this week has unveiled what it says is the first visual scripting language for the semantic web.

Dubbed SPARQLMotion, the scripting language is incorporated into TopBraid Composer Maestro edition, so users get the editing and execution power of that product in conjunction with SPARQLMotion scripts. Users can integrate data sources, run queries on the combined data, and create information mash-ups, reports, and applications on an as-needed basis. SPARQLMotion targets business users who lack programming skills but want to maximize output from business intelligence and other enterprise applications without involving IT departments or application developers.

Dean Allemang, chief scientist at TopQuadrant, likens the new module to a working version of Yahoo Pipes. But he admits to initially having had some skepticism about the whole enterprise of applying visual scripting to achieve the ends at which SPARQLMotion is aiming. “I’ve used lots of visual programming languages over the years and only one was vaguely successful, and it was in a vertical area,” he says. “But SPARQLMotion works.”

Why and how? He attributes this to some unexpected synergy between the semantic web and visual scripting languages.

“What makes this work is the semantic web is about data and metadata, not about execution, and many visual scripting languages have been about execution,” Allemang says. “But for data what you want to do is say here is a data source here is a data source, and you want to say, ‘Grab that and slam them all together.’” That doesn’t make sense unless those data sources are in RDF, and once they are, “merging data is as easy as slamming them together which you can do in a visual scripting language and that’s why it works.”

SPARQLMotion leverages TopBraid Composer’s ability to transform a wide variety of data sources into RDF formats, and back out again — over 50 modules support a comprehensive range of data inputs, outputs and transformations. XML, HTML, RSS, RDF, Atom, databases, text files, Excel, and e-mail formats are all importable; processing includes the ability to merge, transform and filter data, as well as apply rules, text processing and data conversion; and the result can be exported as files, spreadsheets, maps, calendars, outgoing e-mails, and databases.

“With these three layers, these are all capabilities that TopBraid Composer Maestro edition has had for awhile, but now with the visual scripting language the power of this has just exploded,” Allemang says.

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