I think going for Gremlin actually moves away from the RDF idea a bit.
If I want a base for both I would have to do something that does neither
look like Gremlin, nor like SPARQL... but I like the Spock idea. Not
because of syntax, but because it combines imperative and declarative
elements.
So let me try to make a wild suggestion and you guys tell me if you
think that goes in the right direction. Also this is no final form, it
is more to suggest something.
Based on this Gremlin:
g.V().match(
__.as('creators').out('created').has('name','lop').as('projects'),
__.as('projects').in('created').has('age',29).as('cocreators')
).select('creators','cocreators').by('name')
I was thinking of
gremlin(g) {
match(creators, cocreators) {
creators ==> created ==> projects
projects.name == 'lop'
cocreators ==> created ==> projects
cocreators.age == 29
}.select(creators.name, cocreators.name)
}
Such a DSL would be far from just some syntactic sugar though. After
__.as('creators').out('created').has('name','lop').as('projects') we end
up in the node that has been labeled projects. To continue from here and
get the cocreators we actually need to go backwards again, is why we
start with the node and go through in back to a node that we then call
cocreators. The DSL would infer that. This also means going a very big
step away from imperative to more declarative. But that is a key part in
Spock as well.
I can imagine such DSL to have a gremlin specialization and a SPARQL
one, with a common core and each implementation may add something for
its flavor, while the core is the biggest part and stays the same. Also
I could imagine having a super simple graph as base construct for using
the DSL without Jena or TinkerPop. That DSL could then define a
reference implementation and Gremlin and SPARQL build on top.
Not sure yet about the mapping part.
Please write what you think about it. Or simply if you have other ideas.
Or if you expected something totally different.
bye Jochen
On 8/11/26 16:57, Christopher Smith wrote:
Count me in. I have developed some in-house extension methods and
library facilities in this area, particularly around entity mapping, and
have had the idea of trying to clean them up for publication.
Christopher Smith
On Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 08:23 Matt Burgess <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I use Gremlin and Groovy often so would love to discuss that angle
further, especially adding some more Groovy syntactic sugar to the
Gremlin DSL to make the queries super-clear, like Spock does for
BDD/TDD.
Regards,
Matt
On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 9:15 AM Stephen Mallette
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello, With knowledge graphs in mind, Apache TinkerPop has long
offered gremlin-groovy which contains, among other things, a
sugar syntax that makes the Gremlin graph query language a bit
more Groovy. I've always thought it might benefit from experts
from the Groovy community who could build upon that foundation.
I think that some fast impact to making Groovy more knowledge
graph ready could be some improvements there. Not RDF obviously,
but property graphs are riding in that same space in many ways.
Happy to talk about that angle further if there's interest from
anyone.
On Sat, Aug 8, 2026 at 4:52 PM Jochen Theodorou
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi all,
I am recently learning a lot about knowledge graphs and
started to
wonder if we should make a Groovy module for that.
The idea(s):
* use Apache Jena as base
* provide one or more DSLs to allow semantic mapping from an
object
structure to an RDF style structure (RDF, RDFS, OWL)
* Use SPARQL/another Groovy DSL to query the knowledge base,
but also
allow building dynamic queries. Not sure that GINQ works for
this part,
maybe in some cases, but I certainly would want to allow
similar features.
* provide semantic mapping DSL to map from query result to
object structure.
but it makes only sense if there is interest in this by more
than just
myself.
Also I am not sure about the time frame for such a project
bye Jochen
