Towards a Commons RDF Library - ApacheCon Europe 2014

1. Towards a
Commons RDF
Library
Sergio Fernández, Andy Seaborne and Peter Ansell
http://commons-rdf.github.io

2. 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

3. 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!

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.

7. Developers, we need you!
what other interfaces
are desired by
developers?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/6300175460

8. Design by (git) committee

9. 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

10. Discussion Panel

11. thanks!
available under
CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0
International License
http://commons-rdf.github.io
acknowledgments to
MICO FP7 project
(grant no. 610480)