Object/triple mapping as one building block for software develop

Hi all,

in order to simplify integration of linked data in our software 
projects, we translated standard object-relational mapping patterns to 
object/triple mapping. The key idea is to help software developers by 
letting them do *everything* with means of their programming language. 
That is, developers shouldn't even have to know that there is something 
like nodes, triples or HTTP (for simple applications, at least).

Our first version of a Java implementaion can be found here:

https://projects.quasthoffs.de/otm-j/

So far, exposing linked data as Java objects and querying SPARQL 
endpoints works. SPARQL queries are not specified as strings but can be 
created using the OO data model (i.e. field names instead of RDF 
property names, Java locales instead of string language tags etc.).

We also hope to be able to integrate different types of policies (trust, 
privacy, and data licenses), as well as some kind of provenance 
information. Such framework automating triple handling could easily 
relieve developers from recurring implementation tasks regarding any 
kind of policies. We think that in most cases, a standard solution will 
be appropriate and the respective standards will be more appealing to 
developers if they can find a simple way to use them.

I know that there is Sommer and RDFReactor and more, and I hope we'll be 
able to achieve some kind of compatibility between our approaches. But I 
truly think that handling linked data rather requires something like 
design patterns, when and where to handle which kind of data, policies 
etc. I hope we can join some kind of discussion in this direction, and 
that somebody will find our work useful for their project.

Best regards from Berlin,
Matthias

otm-j@quasthoffs.de

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 06:38:05 UTC