Hey All Just thought I¹d share my thoughts on ApacheCon Day 1 having spent a bunch of time talking to various people about Apache. A common theme that has come up is that it would be beneficial to Jena and the wider ASF if we tried to pursue more cross pollination and collaboration with other projects. Both in terms of promoting the Jena brand but also in potentially gaining new collaborators.
In terms of specific collaboration opportunities I¹ve heard a few different ideas. I spent a bunch of time talking with Lewis McGibbney who¹s involved in Any23 about how Jena might make it easier for projects to share common functionality like RDF parsers. The current module structures are something of a barrier in this regard since we have multiple versions of some readers and they are quite closely coupled into some aspects of our APIs. Improving modularisation in the future (as I think we hope to do in Jena 3x eventually) would make things like this easier for people. Another personal bug bear of Lewis¹s was the lack of a Fuseki WAR (JENA-201) which I did tell him will be resolved soon with the new Fuseki 2x. The other more speculative things we talked about concerned future directions for Any23, Lewis wants to get to a point where the extracted triples can be more flexibly output including things like writing direct to TDB so there is room for discussion on what the best way of doing that is. Also whether there is room for any integration with Gora which is a framework for big data persistence so the collaboration there would be to look at adding persistence to triple stores like TDB. In another discussion with a Phoenix (currently Incubating) project I realised that these folks must have some sort of SQL parser that is ALv2 compatible. I know on the list in the past we discussed merging the current Jena JDBC modules which do SPARQL over JDBC with Claude¹s efforts on GitHub which map RDF to relational and SQL to SPARQL and the main barrier to that was a lack of ALv2 compatible SQL parsing library. So it would be worth talking to the Phoenix folks about what they use for SQL parsing and seeing whether we can then use that to bring Claude¹s JDBC approach into Jena JDBC and support both approaches side by side. The other interesting discussion I had was with some folks from the Sqoop project after seeing their talk on Sqoop 2 which is a ETL framework at Apache. Currently they predominantly just extract from relational databases and write to HBase, flat files on HDFS etc. It seems like there is an opportunity there to work together to add RDF support both on the input and output sides. Rob
