It’s been a busy few months at Oxford Semantic Technologies, with the launch of our ‘Reasonable Vehicles’ video, growth of our partner network and now, the release of RDFox Version 5!
Along with performance enhancements, the latest version of RDFox brings a variety of new capabilities and updates. RDFox now supports SHACL, property paths and we include a release dedicated to the new Apple M1 ARM chip. These developments mean RDFox now has complete support for SPARQL 1.1. The console has new slick features and our support for OWL and Solr has been updated for increased usability.
We experienced a speedup up to a factor of two for particular complex SPARQL queries with RDFox Version 5. Additionally, the improved handling of OWL reasoning makes it much easier to integrate RDFox into an existing Knowledge Graph workflow. Together with the support of property paths, all SPARQL update features as well as sophisticated date/time computation functions makes RDFox Version 5 a milestone release.
In this release we addressed a number of hot topics being requested by our clients: property paths, SHACL support and improved OWL support. For those new to RDFox we are especially delighted to now offer an intuitive web-based way of getting started with and administrating datastores.
With Version 5 comes support for SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language), the W3C standard for RDF data validation and defining constraints. This will be significantly beneficial for users who seek to constrain data store content and are familiar with both RDF and SPARQL.
By supporting SHACL, users have the option of two different methods for undertaking constraint validation in RDFox. Information on constraint validation using Datalog constraints is outlined in this article.
RDFox 5.0.0 brings another powerful tool in the knowledge engineer’s toolbox in the form of SHACL constraint validation. This allows users to create and maintain high-quality knowledge graphs in a flexible, performant and interoperable manner.
Since RDFox’s inception, there has been considerable focus on providing a highly intuitive solution. The addition of property paths in RDFox allows our users to write concise SPARQL queries, while providing more freedom during SPARQL creation. Not only is this great for our users, but the development means that RDFox now has complete support for SPARQL 1.1.
The RDFox console is now even more adept. With new features, including the ability to create a new data store from the console. This improves our offering to users interacting with RDFox through the cloud.
RDFox Version 5 is directly compatible with the new M1 Mac ARM Chip. But that’s not all — the team were thrilled to see that using the new ARM chip, RDFox’s world record speed just got speedier!
Internal testing found that RDFox runs 15–30% faster on the M1 — more information on this to come!
A range of other updates have helped to improve the user experience and ability of RDFox to deal with complex problems. Version 5 has made troubleshooting easier in the cloud by adding HTTP request logging. If something doesn’t go to plan, you can simply check the log to see what happened! Adjustments to our OWL support means it is now more compatible with named graphs.
Version 5 is a major step forward in our efforts to fully support W3C standards. With the implementation of property paths, Version 5 now provides full coverage of the SPARQL 1.1 language and, with the implementation of SHACL, we bring new capabilities for defining constraints and validating data against them. In addition, we have improved and extended our OWL support, and made it compatible with the use of named graphs.
If you’d like to try out Version 5, you can request a 30 day free trial or a demonstration.
For more information about RDFox, see the product page or our blog!
The team behind Oxford Semantic Technologies started working on RDFox in 2011 at the Computer Science Department of the University of Oxford with the conviction that flexible and high-performance reasoning was a possibility for data-intensive applications without jeopardising the correctness of the results. RDFox is the first market-ready knowledge graph designed from the ground up with reasoning in mind. Oxford Semantic Technologies is a spin-out of the University of Oxford and is backed by leading investors including Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), Oxford Sciences Enterprises (OSE) and Oxford University Innovation (OUI).
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