Re: Is SPIN still a valid direction?

Hi Antonino,

SPIN is a very active and widely adopted (for a semantic web technology).
Besides Topquadrant (the originators) and Alegrograph, I know of 3 more SPARQL vendors who have
committed resources and started development work on implementing SPIN support, expect announcements
around summer next year. 
And that is just among those I have contact with (which might be a biased sample ; but 75% of the sampled vendors)

The W3C shapes workgroup is focussed on a sub part of the SPIN functionality.
Validation and documentation, however, the SPIN supporters/inventors are very active in
that workgroup and it is very likely SPIN (evolved) will be a large part of that standard.

As you are interested in inferencing and open data workflows the W3C shapes workgroup work is 
not of interest to your core functionality. See e.g. http://www.w3.org/2014/data-shapes/wiki/Requirements

In the end SPIN is translated before execution and can be used on SPARQL implementations that do
not support SPIN yet. SPIN is not so widely used in research but has a significant number of paying
clients and complicated projects behind it.

I personally have used it on different projects and am very happy with the great and active support 
on the TopQuadrant mailing list. I would also love to work on a OpenRDF Sesame implementation, but just lack
the time to do so. Once someone has implemented a SPARQL engine SPIN is a relatively simple technology. Just translate a RDF
representation of the SPARQL query into the SPARQL algebra model inside your engine (if needed via a text representation).

Hoping this is helpful,

Regards,
Jerven


On 19 Dec 2014, at 18:33, Antonino Lo Bue <lobue@pa.icar.cnr.it> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm wondering if someone from the list could make a clear point on SPIN
> adoption and usage status. I'm planning to use it in my research work to
> model SPARQL inferencing on Open data->Linked open data workflows , but I
> have heard that something new is coming and would/could replace SPIN with
> a more flexible language.
> Is this the case and so I could risk to work with outdated and legacy
> stuff? Or do you encourage the adoption?
> 
> Thanks and regards
> 
> Antonino Lo Bue
> CNR-ICAR Palermo
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/antoninolobue
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 23 December 2014 07:25:17 UTC