Kowari Paper for WWW2005

David Wood, Paul Gearon and I have just completed a paper on Kowari entitled "Kowari: A Platform for Semantic Web Storage and Analysis" for the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005) next year in Japan.

Large-scale Semantic Web applications require large-scale storage of Resource Description Framework (RDF) information and a means to analyze that information via the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in near real time. The Kowari Metastore was designed as a purpose-built RDF database to fulfill this requirement. Kowari provides a scalable, transaction-safe storage infrastructure for RDF statements and an expressive query language for their analysis, with or without the use of a subset of the RDF Schema and/or OWL languages. OWL Lite plus the full cardinality constraints from OWL Full are currently supported via the interactive Tucana Query Language (iTQL) or the Simple Ontology Framework API (SOFA). Kowari’s native quad-store indexing scheme has been shown to scale to hundreds of millions of RDF statements on a single machine. Kowari is an Open Source project sponsored by Tucana Technologies and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

It's basically an overview paper containing an explanation of the components that make up the system focusing on the query engine, the resolver framework and the XA statement store. So it's very much like similar papers on Sesame and the 3store. We're pretty hopeful it'll be accepted, we think we needed to provide a good overview of this important piece of Semantic Web infrastructure. (Update... The paper wasn't accepted to the stream we submitted it to at www2005, but was accepted to xtech 2005).