Proswip: Property-based data access for semantic web interactive programming

Abstract

Abstract. The Semantic Web has matured from a mere theoretical vision to a variety of ready-to-use linked open data sources currently available on the Web. Still, with respect to application development, the Web community is just starting to develop new paradigms in which data as the main driver of applications is promoted to first class status. Relying on properties of resources as an indicator for the type, property-based typing is such a paradigm. In this paper, we inspect the feasibility of property-based typing for accessing data from the linked open data cloud. Problems in terms of transparency and quality of the selected data were noticeable. To alleviate these problems, we developed an iterative approach that builds on human feedback. Introduction The amount of data available on the Web has considerably increased in the last few years. Despite huge efforts in the area of the Semantic Web to make such web data machine-processable, only a few applications have been developed that can take full advantage of this data. Besides the general sparseness of semantic data, this behavior is currently explained by the different representation formalisms of semantic data and application programming languages causing a problem of data-model/programming language interoperability. However, generated code is often unintelligible, hard to customize and almost impossible to maintain. While some frameworks make customization and maintainability more convenient by including support for IDEs, compile-time meta-programming [4] represents a better technique to cope with the interoperability problem. With compile-time meta-programming, developers can programmatically generate required classes instead of providing them directly into the source code. One such approach was recently presented by Microsoft as a feature of F# 3.