Announcing OWLIM 5.3 - new workbench, improved monitoring and control, nested repositories, online backup and more

Ontotext are pleased to announce the release of
<http://www.ontotext.com/owlim> OWLIM version 5.3 that includes
<http://www.openrdf.org/> Sesame 2.6.10 and a variety of new features and
updates. This version is completely compatible with any OWLIM database
created with OWLIM since version 5.0.

Users of OWLIM-SE now have a new deployment option in the form of a
standalone, ready-to-run
<http://owlim.ontotext.com/display/OWLIMv53/OWLIM-Workbench>
OWLIM-Workbench, which combines Sesame and OWLIM with a jetty server, and
includes an administration interface built using the Forest framework. This
framework was developed internally at Ontotext and is used to build services
such as  <http://factforge.net/> FactForge and  <http://linkedlifedata.com/>
LinkedLifeData.

The OWLIM-Workbench provides a super set of features currently provided by
the bundled Sesame Workbench, including:

*	Security: Easier to configure HTTP authentication, administration of
user accounts and repository level access control
*	Repository management and configuration editing
*	Data loading functionality
*	Query execution using SPARQL syntax highlighting and results
inspection
*	Data exploration and export
*	System information reporting

'
<http://owlim.ontotext.com/display/OWLIMv53/OWLIM-SE+Experimental+Features#O
WLIM-SEExperimentalFeatures-NestedRepositories> Nested repositories' is an
experimental OWLIM-SE feature for 'stacking' or 'sharing' repositories
suitable for situations in which a large collection of reference data
(perhaps some collection of linked open datasets) are shared by multiple
OWLIM instances. Rather than store the large reference data in each
specialised repository, it can just be referenced and will be used for query
answering and for computing inferences with local data in the specialised
repository.

Monitoring and control functions have been expanded with the ability to
terminate a runaway update transaction. SPARQL will allow the construction
of updates that can be cause arbitrarily large numbers of new statements to
be inserted. In such a case, it is possible to instruct OWLIM to abort a
long running update and rollback to the previous state. Better query logging
is also provided for examining execution plans and on-the-fly optimisations.

The functionality of OWLIM-Enterprise has been expanded in two ways.
Firstly, convenient backup and restore methods have been added to the JMX
interface. These use the replication function to copy a worker node database
image to a directory on the cluster master node for making a backup, and
also to copy an image from the master node to all attached workers when
restoring from a backup. Also, the 'remote replication' feature allows two
clusters to remain in synch. This can be useful when maintaining a disaster
recovery cluster instance, because it allows the master in the remote
cluster to appear like a normal worker node and receives updates from the
master in the main cluster.

Other improvements include:

*	A performance degradation when loading very large datasets has been
fixed. After a few billion statements load performance started to drop and
by around 6 billion statements performance was four times slower than it
should be. After the fix the data loading speed at 20 billion statements is
around 50% slower than with an empty database.
*	It is now possible to put a global limit on the number of query
results per query. Any queries that generate more results will have the
remainder truncated. This feature can be useful for any public-facing SPARQL
endpoints.
*	The Jena adapter layer for OWLIM-SE has been updated to version
2.7.3. This is also reflected in the TopBraid Composer plug-in.
*	Consistency checks in OWLIM-SE and OWLIM-Enterprise are now strictly
enforced. If consistency checking is enabled, data that causes an
inconsistency will not be allowed and an update transaction containing an
inconsistency will abort and rollback to the previous database state. For
example, if using the OWL2-RL ruleset an attempt to declare an individual as
being a member of two disjoint classes will trigger a rollback.

For a full list of updates, see the release notes for the relevant edition
of  <http://owlim.ontotext.com/> OWLIM.

 

logo_OT_signature.png

The OWLIM team
November 2012