Kowari: A Platform for Semantic Web Storage and Analysis

Paul, Dave and my Kowari paper has finally been published (officially that is).

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). The native quad-store indexing scheme used in Kowari has been shown to scale to hundreds of millions of RDF statements on a single machine. Kowari is an Open Source project licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

This is an overview paper, intended to give a good overview of the workings of Kowari without going into too much detail. This is good timing, as Andrew and I have been working on JRDF updates recently, including adding SPARQL support.

Flame on!!!