I am proud to announce the release the websites of two of our products to come: structWSF and conStruct. Both products will be available in open source under the Apache 2 license. Mike just unveiled and demoed the two projects in his talk at SemTech 2009.

As we describe them on Structured Dynamics‘ website:

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 optionally a document of resultsets. 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. Support for additional datastores and engines is planned. The design also allows other specialized systems to be included, such as analysis or advanced inference engines.

The framework is open source (Apache 2 license) and designed for extensibility. structWSF and its extensions and enhancements are distributed and documented on the OpenStructs Web site.

conStruct

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.

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.

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. It also provides a system for additional tools additions and expansions for this structured data. conStruct SCS is built on the platform-independent structWSF Web services framework.

Like Drupal and structWSF, conStruct is free and open source (GPL license). Versions of conStruct SCS are planned to adopt it to other content management systems (CMS).

Next

The alpha version of the code with all the proper documentation will be released later this summer. Everybody will be able to contribute to the project by enhancing/developing the core code or by extending it with new modules and web services. Stay tuned!

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