TopQuadrant has released TopBraid Suite 3.0, which includes two significant advancements for Semantic Web application development .
TopBraid Suite 3.0 provides a graphical application assembly toolkit that allows users to dynamically configure Semantic Web applications using pre-built components. In addition, TopBraid Suite 3.0 is the first application development platform to support SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation), a new Semantic Web language with an explicit object-orientated rule model that can link data and domain models.
TopBraid Ensemble, which is part of TopBraid Suite 3.0, is a graphical Semantic Web application assembly toolkit that allows users to configure a variety of Rich Internet Applications. Users do not need to manually program application components using languages such as Java or JavaScript. Instead, they simply select and arrange a set of components on the screen and push the save button to share the new application with others.
A library of components addresses key application functionality, including grids, trees, search and edit forms, maps and charts, a visual query editor for SPARQL and dynamic event relays. This set of components supports building systems for collaborative development and management of controlled vocabularies, search and data exploration, mashups, Semantic wikis and other application areas. Integration with server-side scripts and SPIN rules enables components to be configured for implementing application and context-specific business logic.
SPIN (SPARQL Inferencing Notation) is an open source collection of RDF vocabularies that allow SPARQL users to define business rules for Semantic Web applications. SPARQL is a well-established W3C standard implemented by many industrial-strength RDF APIs and databases. Based on SPARQL, SPIN provides an open source Java API distributed under a dual license by TopQuadrant.
Instead of relying on the textual representation of SPARQL expressions, SPIN offers an RDF schema for SPARQL. As a result, SPARQL queries can be stored as RDF triples together with any RDF domain model. This enables the linkage of RDF resources with associated queries and sharing and reuse of queries as part of Semantic Web models. SPIN also provides meta-modeling capabilities that allow users to define their own SPARQL functions and query templates.
