Structured Dynamics Announces Drupal and Web Services Frameworks at SemTech 2009 Conference
After six months of dedicated effort, we are pleased to announce two new products: conStruct, which is a set of modules for bringing structured (RDF) content capabilities to Drupal and structWSF, the platform-independent Web services framework that underlies it.
There has been some promising effort to expose RDF data from Drupal for some time, and expressing internal data within Drupal as RDFa is being implemented by others as part of the upcoming version 7 of Drupal. These are exciting prospects that we wholeheartedly applaud. In fact, they will also be great sources to our products noted below.
However, our innovation looks through the other end of the telescope: Our new conStruct structured content system (SCS) enables external structured data to actually ‘drive the application‘. We think Drupal is the perfect host to demonstrate this new paradigm of ‘data-driven apps’.
The conStruct Drupal module makes the connections between existing Drupal capabilities and the structWSF Web services framework. structWSF provides a standard suite of Web services, an innovative means to access and manage datasets, and the hooks to underlying structured data stores and full-text search engines.
Combined with the existing efforts to expose RDF from Drupal, we think these two new products now promise a two-way highway for structured data thorugh Drupal.
structWSF
structWSF is a platform-independent Web services framework for accessing and exposing structured RDF data. Its central organizing perspective is that of the dataset. These datasets contain instance records, with the structural relationships amongst the data and their attributes and concepts defined via ontologies (schema with accompanying vocabularies).
The structWSF middleware framework is generally RESTful in design and is based on HTTP and Web protocols and open standards. The initial structWSF framework comes packaged with a baseline set of about a dozen Web services in CRUD, browse, search and export and import.
All Web services are exposed via APIs and SPARQL endpoints. Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status and a document of resultsets (if the query result is not null). Each results document can be serialized in many ways, and may be expressed as either RDF or pure XML.
In initial release, structWSF has direct interfaces to the Virtuoso RDF triple store (via ODBC, and later HTTP) and the Solr faceted, full-text search engine (via HTTP). However, structWSF has been designed to be fully platform-independent. The framework is open source (Apache 2 license) and designed for extensibility.
conStruct SCS
conStruct SCS is a structured content system that extends the basic Drupal content management framework. conStruct enables structured data and its controlling vocabularies (ontologies) to drive applications and user interfaces.
Users and groups can flexibly access and manage any or all datasets exposed by the system depending on roles and permissions. Report and presentation templates are easily defined, styled or modified based on the underlying datasets and structure. Collaboration networks can readily be established across multiple installations and non-Drupal endpoints. Powerful linked data integration can be included to embrace data anywhere on the Web.
conStruct provides Drupal-level CRUD (create – read – update – delete), data display templating, faceted browsing, full-text search, and import and export over structured data stores based on RDF. Depending on roles and permissions, a given user may or may not see specific datasets or tools within the Drupal interface. Search and browse results are similarly sequestered depending on access rights. There is a core conStruct project on Drupal, with the additional optional modules of structDisplay and structOntology coming soon thereafter.
Two Accompanying Web Sites
In addition to the products themselves, two different Web sites accompany our announcement, both based on Drupal.
OpenStructs.org is dedicated to the platform-independent offerings. All OpenStructs tools are premised on the canonical RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model. OpenStructs tools either convert existing data structures to RDF, extract structure from content as RDF, or manage and manipulate RDF. All OpenStructs tools and approaches are compliant with existing open standards from the W3C. The intent is to achieve maximum data and software interoperabililty.
The main software distribution from OpenStructs is structWSF. Over time, OpenStructs is also meant to be the distribution point for user-generated “structs” in data display templating, and data extractors and converters, in addition to additional Web services compliant with the structWSF framework.
conStruct SCS is a knowledge site dedicated to conStruct and provides demos and sandboxes for the system. It accompanies the actual project sites on Drupal itself.
Unveiled at SemTech 2009
We unveiled and demoed the two products yesterday at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California. I did so during my talk on, "BKN: Building Communities through Knowledge, and Knowledge Through Communities." SemTech 2009 is a premier semantic Web event, which has been steadily growing and now exceeds 1000 attendees.
structWSF has been under development by Structured Dynamics for some time. Its linkage and incorporation within the Drupal system has more recently been supported by the Bibliographic Knowledge Network.
BKN is a major, two-year, NSF-funded project jointly sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the American Institute of Mathematics, with broad private sector and community support. BKN is developing a suite of tools and infrastructure for citations and bibliographies within the mathematics and statistics domain based on semantic technologies for professionals, students or researchers to form new communities.
An alpha version of structWSF will released for download from the OpenStructs (http://openstructs.org) Web site on June 30. The conStruct system will be released at the same time under GPL license. See its home site at http://constructscs.com or within the Drupal module system (http://drupal.org/project/construct).
Some Early Observations
Structured Dynamics has as its mission to assist enterprises and non-profit organizations and projects to adopt Web-accessible and interoperable data. These are our first product offerings geared to address this mission.
The basic premise is that the data itself becomes the application. Via structured, linked data and a combination of products and Web services, information in any form and from any source can now be integrated and made interoperable. Linked data is based on open standards to interconnect any form of relevant information on the Web — on demand and in context.
One of the most exciting aspects of the overall architecture behind these two products is their suitability to support distributed collaboration, across diverse and definable datasets, all supported by sensitivity to role-based data and tools (Web services) access.
We’ll be speaking much more on these topics now that we have this foundation in place. We also, of course, have much to learn about the deployment and use case potentials of these frameworks.
These two products signal our (SD’s) commitment to open source. We hope some of you also see the promise in these frameworks to provide an adaptive infrastructure to linked and structured data. We welcome your participation!
