Recorded Webcast: Javascript - The Key to Successful SemWeb Deployments

February 14, 2012

Semantic Web databases need a scripting language for server side programming. We will demonstrate that Javascript has all the power and flexibility to be such a language. In addition we'll show how scripts and queries can be turned into named web services.

Ideally, declarative query languages (ie SQL, SPARQL) would be so powerful that we would never need to perform any procedural server side programming in the database. However, the reality is that every Enterprise application backed by a relational database relies heavily on server side programming language link PL/SQL or a very vendor specific binding to Java/C++.

Currently, the W3C nor the Semantic Web community have a proposal for server side scripting languages or named services and from our view in the trenches we see that Javascript has all the right properties to be both this scripting language and the basis for named services.

During this presentation we will demonstrate our Javascript compiler and a Javascript library that can perform all the basic handling of RDF quads, indices, and databases. This server side Javascript can also include SPARQL and Prolog and has rich functionality for temporal and spatial functions and can be used to write graph based algorithms that will work at server speed.

MongoDB's wide adoption has created a large demand for working with JSON objects. Our proposed library supports the MongoDB API to make working with JSON objects in combination with RDF nearly transparent. On top of all this, we can take any server defined program or function and make it instantly available as a REST call which instantly opens the Semantic Web to a host of programming talent.

View a recording of the event here - 35 min.

Download the presentation slides here