Stardog is a fast, lightweight RDF database. Today we’re announcing limited access to our beta testing program, in preparation for the 1.0 release. If you’re interested in beta-testing Stardog, drop me an email.
What and why?
There’s a niche in the RDF commercial market that’s not well-served—we built Stardog to fill this niche. After testing many RDF databases, we couldn’t find one that was exactly right for the use cases and requirements that we care about: zero config, fast, transactional, lightweight, embeddable, client-server, high-throughput, rich OWL 2 reasoning, stored procedures in any JVM-based language RDF database. Whew!
Speed Kills
RDF and OWL are excellent technologies for building data integration and analysis apps. Those apps invariably require complex query processing, i.e., queries where there are lots of joins, complex logical conditions to evaluate, etc. Stardog is targeted at absolute query performance for complex SPARQL queries.
Lightweight, Braindead Simple Deployment
Winners ship. No excuses. No one wants complex deployment models. Stardog works out-of-the-box with minimal (none, typically) configuration. You shouldn’t have to fight to install or to tune an RDF database for days. Because Stardog is pure Java, it will run anywhere, in any servlet container, on any OS.
OWL 2 Reasoning
Finally, Stardog has the most comprehensive and best OWL reasoning support of any commercial RDF database available.
Stardog 1.0 will support: SPARQL 1.1 entailment regimes, Terp, OWL 2 DL schema reasoning via PelletDb, OWL 2 QL (query-time reasoning), and OWL 2 closed world reasoning via Pellet ICV. We’ll add OWL 2 RL support to Stardog in a future release.
Okay, there’s a lot there and we’ll unpack it all in good time; but for now the point is that Stardog’s reasoning support is not only more comprehensive than any other RDF database, it’s more consistent, rational, and tied carefully to the W3C’s OWL 2 standard. Stardog also encompasses all the relevant points on the scalability-expressivity spectrum, as well as hitting all of the significant reasoning modes of operation (batch, on-demand, query-time).
Next Steps
We’re running a limited, private beta for Stardog starting 1 March and running to 30 May. We’ve got a few open slots, and we want to cast a wide net to find some new orgs and new faces with new use cases and requirements for a commercial RDF database. If you’re interested, drop me an email.
Kendall Clark
10 January 2011
