ANN: SPARQL Inferencing Notation (SPIN)

Together with today's release of TopBraid Suite 3.0, TopQuadrant  
officially releases the SPARQL Inferencing Notation (SPIN) [1]. SPIN  
has been in beta for several months and is in very successful routine  
use within our customer base and in TopQuadrant's internal projects.

SPIN is a collection of RDF vocabularies enabling the use of SPARQL to  
define constraints and inference rules on Semantic Web models. SPIN  
also provides meta-modeling capabilities that allow users to define  
their own SPARQL functions and query templates. These meta-modeling  
capabilities can also be used to express other modeling languages such  
as OWL RL, but basically people can use this mechanism to create their  
own modeling vocabulary without being limited to whatever expressivity  
is provided by hard-coded modeling languages.

SPIN provides an RDF syntax for SPARQL. This syntax is used to link  
class definitions with rules and constraints, similar to procedural  
attachment or object-oriented programming.

We have decided to make the TopBraid SPIN API open source [2] because  
we believe that this technology could be useful for many semantic web  
projects around the world. This Java API includes facilities for  
SPARQL-based constraint checking and inferencing.

For a quick introduction to SPIN, please check out the screenshots at  
[3].

There are several example case studies ranging from unit conversion to  
computer games in my blog [4].

Regards,
Holger

[1] http://spinrdf.org
[2] http://topbraid.org/spin/api
[3] http://www.topquadrant.com/products/SPIN.html
[4] http://composing-the-semantic-web.blogspot.com/

Received on Friday, 1 May 2009 20:09:13 UTC