SemWeb LAMP stack [was Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal]

On 21 Nov 2018, at 14:40, David Booth wrote:

> 1. Tools are scattered.  How to find them?  Which to use?
> Every team wastes time going through a similar research and
> selection process.
>
> One idea: create a bundled release of RDF tools, analogous
> to a standard LAMP stack, or Red Hat or Ubuntu; so that if
> someone wants to use RDF all they have to do is install that
> bundle and they're ready to go.

I very much like this idea. I would particularly like to see a standard 
web stack that could be used with a triplestore of choice. Many 
developers love Neo4J becomes it's bundled with nice visual exploration 
mechanisms.

In contrast, with a typical SPARQL endpoint, you get something much more 
bare bones and it varies depending on which triplestore you use. It’s 
not super-enticing to non-geeks, and even for us SPARQL geeks, it’s 
not always clear how to get started.

Of course, there is a lot of great code out there that can be used to 
build a generic front end, but it’s all very disjointed, and many of 
us end up rolling our own code, e.g. for providing users with templated 
queries, or deriving a simple schema that can be used for exploration.

A killer app would be a ‘semantic web generic client in a box’. 
Simply start a server pointing at a SPARQL endpoint(s). Optionally 
configure it with some example queries, metadata about what property to 
derive labels (or introspect this from the endpoint itself), and get:

  - A form interface for SPARQL queries with a menu of example queries 
that give you an idea of how to get started, plus some useful standard 
prefixes
  - Simple linked data browsing (using conneg for html vs turtle)
  - Dumb generic graphical browsing, a la neo4j
  - Basic schema derivation; or just stats on most used classes and 
properties
  - A generic semantic hypermedia API
  - An autogenerated domain-specific swagger API (e.g. using garlik)

I believe a lot of these pieces exist already, it's just that we as a 
community need to do a better job of putting these things together in an 
easy to use package. This shouldn't be so hard now it's easy to 
containerize things and orchestrate them.