banana-rdf

An RDF library in Scala

banana-rdf is a library for RDF, SPARQL and Linked Data technologies in Scala.

It can be used with existing libraries without any added cost. There is no wrapping involved: you manipulate directly the real objects. We currently support Jena, Sesame and Plantain, a pure Scala implementation.

Features

banana-rdf emphasizes type-safety and immutability, so it can come with some cost when the underlying implementation is very mutable (I'm looking at you, Jena and Sesame). We try to keep a clear distinction between the core concepts and the enhanced syntax that Scala can give us.

RDF itself is defined as a record of types. Implementations just have to plug their own types. And because types alone are not enough, we introduce the RDFOps typeclass, which defines the mandatory operations that an RDF implementation must implement. SparqlOps does the same for SPARQL.

With banana-rdf, you get Diesel, a nice DSL to build and navigate within pointed graphs (graphs with a pointer to an inner node). You also get an abstraction for graph stores (GraphStore), which do not have to be SPARQL engines (SparqlEngine). Of course, you can serialize and deserialize most of the RDF syntaxes (RDFa and JSON-LD will come soon).

banana-rdf introduces the concept of binders, which let you bridge the Scala and RDF worlds. Most of the common datastructures are already available, and you can even map your own classes. Unlike usual ORM techniques, this does not rely on annotation or reflection.

Until we write thorough documentation, the best place to understand what you can do is to go through the test suite.

How to start geeking

You only need a recent version of Java, that's all:

$ git clone [email protected]:w3c/banana-rdf.git
$ cd banana-rdf
$ ./sbt

Contributions

All contributions are welcome. By contributing, you accept to give the ownership of your contribution to the World Wide Web Consortium. They are a nonprofit organization and just want to simplify the gouvernance of this opensource project.

Licence

This source code is made available under the W3C Licence. This is a business friendly license.