Technology award for Ingenta's metastore
We're proud to report that we were recently awarded Best Applications Paper at the inaugural Jena User Conference. The conference was organised by world-renowned technology systems provider HP (formerly known as Hewlett Packard) and held at HP Labs in Bristol. Ingenta software engineers Katie Portwin and Priya Parvatikar presented a paper detailing their groundbreaking use of Jena, an open source Java framework developed by HP Labs' Semantic Web Programme. Jena is the technology chosen by Ingenta to deliver our new 'Metastore', an RDF triplestore which will be phased in over the coming months to accommodate all the raw data delivered by IngentaConnect.
Metastore has been designed from the ground upwards to recognise and support the broadening user expectations and requirements of the semantic web era. It is a scalable data repository -- the largest commercial deployment of its kind -- and allows for increasingly flexible content models. For example, it will facilitate creation of "virtual journals" whereby publishers (and perhaps, longer-term, users) can define a diverse set of articles to license as a "journal". Metastore will also address an issue which has received considerable airtime in recent months: users ceasing to distinguish between different types of content (explained, for example, by computer science professor Carole Goble at this year's UKSG Annual Conference). It treats all forms of content equally, thus supporting changing user needs by enabling publishers to upload raw research materials, which can then be delivered either alongside or separately to the output of that research (the published article).
For more (technical!) information about Metastore, check out these postings on our All My Eye blog:
- My triplestore's bigger than your triplestore...
- about the process choosing and testing an RDF engine
- Does your "Boy Scout Handbook" look as though it has been read by a grizzly bear?
- about the complexities of modelling different types of data
- performance, triplestores, and going round in circles..
- about scaling issues
How to Visualise a Triplestore
by Katie Portwin