Smart Content Binding
Enable simple access to relevant content
To support activities in business processes, a company implements information management systems to obtain relevant information from a large amount of inter-related data. For the purpose of building relationships among data items, they need to be described by a set of metadata. Metadata capture domain specific semantics of data available in an information management system. However, when dealing with and producing semantic content, the context is shifted from data to concepts and real world entities. In this context, we distinguish between resources and properties. Properties connect resources, some resources have an intrinsic value (literals), some are associated to values by their names (Uniform Resource Identifiers, URIs) while other gain their meaning solely by their context (bnodes). The main advantage of a semantics-enabled information management system is the flexibility and the ability to merge data from different sources. Moreover, it allows to more effectively find relevant information, for example by exposing more powerful search capabilities.
In this regard, trialox ag defines a logical component in an information management system, termed Smart Content Binding (SCB), which is a versatile, implementation independent and domain agnostic tool to bind any data source to any (generic or domain specific) processors and viewers. SCB gains its flexibility by basing on the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model. It has an API with a set of adapters to triple store and a set of façades to implement existing RDF manipulations API on top of the SCB API. This means, application developers can choose independently which RDF-store to use and against which API(s) to code. Furthermore, SCB provides for a mechanism to notify other components if a query on a mutable graph generates a different result. Trialox implementation of SCB supports the usage in component frameworks such as OSGi. Compared to other similar approaches, e.g., RDF2Go, Trialox SCB clearly demonstrates several key advantages, in particular, it offers a cleaner API, the use of façades, and a notification mechanism. SCB API models the concepts as defined in RDF without exposing implementation specific details such a bnode-IDs. It matches the identity criteria of Java object with the identity of Java classes with those of RDF graphs. Furthermore, codes written against the Jena or Sesame API works on SCB without modifications, thanks to façades exposing these APIs on top of the SCB API. Finally, the notification mechanism enables applications to not have to repeatedly query an RDF source to see if something changed, but they can associate a listener to a query and be notified if soemthing relevant changes.
