Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The product is a response to its customers' frustrations with some of the unusual foundation assumptions OWL (Web Ontology Language) makes about modeling that lead it to behave in a way that is very different from how object-oriented and relational database models work -- many of the things users want to do with business rules turn out to violate these assumptions. Top Quadrant is careful to explain that Spin isn't meant as a competitor to OWL. Rather, it sees it as a complement to the standard that lets veteran data modelers with lots of experience in relational and object-oriented models deal with requirements that OWL doesn't support, such as triggering object constructions when creating new instances of a class.

What sets Spin apart from past attempts by other companies' proprietary efforts to meet customers' needs in this area is that TopQuadrant has built Spin based on SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language).

"We don't want to buck the standards," says Dean Allemang, TopQuadrant chief scientist. "We are being forced to strike out on our own because the assumptions behind OWL are contrary to what our customers want. So we are building Spin to be as close to SPARQL as possible."

By creating a semantic web language with an explicit object-oriented rule model that can link business logic and domain models, including a collection of RDF vocabularies that allow the use of SPARQL to define business rules for Semantic Web applications, SPIN allows users to express rules and constraints with a richer language and better control over runtime performance than possible with OWL or other rule languages, TopQuadrant says.

"What [other companies who tried to solve this in the past] didn't do right was to realize they had to be RDF based. ... We're not the first to think about this but simultaneously we are taking the Semantic Web seriously," Allemang says. In the spirit of remaining a standards-oriented provider, TopQuadrant, a W3C member, has released the Spin API as an open source Java API, and it plans to put Spin onto the W3C's recommendations track, though that is expected to be a long process. Companies also can purchase support from TopQuadrant for Spin if they choose.

Spin is supported by the new TopBraid Suite 3.0. At Enterprise Data World on Monday the vendor also noted that new in TopBraid Ensemble 3.0, which is part of TopBraid Suite 3.0, are more powerful application composition toolkit capabilities.
The SPARQLMotion scripting language is accessible from within Ensemble, and the new Visual Query Editor is designed to enable visualization for discovery and query at a high level, without requiring users to understand syntax or the technical ins and outs of SPARQL. Allemang says it addresses the fact that "building a query is a bit of a technical art and certain classes of users either aren't willing to build this competence up, or even if they are, there is certain conceptual linkage to data" to master. With the new editor, users can draw a graph that shows the data they are looking for, turn it into a query and have that run to the data set to find data like what they've described.

"So the syntactic issues of queries are not your concern. The relationship of query to the underlying data model is evident," he says. It's a great tool for learning SPARQL, Allemang says, as well as a great power tool for those already expert at it, as it gets users away from human errors like misspelling something or other gaffs that affect productivity.

"This all comes together in customization by configuration," Allemang says. "It enables different classes of users to develop web applications." As a graphical assembly toolkit that allows users to dynamically configure Semantic Web applications using pre-built components, TopQuadrant expects Ensemble to be a hit with the Excel macro crowd -- those tech-savvy but not necessarily technical developers business users and analysts who figure out amazing ways to extend that spreadsheet's capabilities. They're a ripe audience for exploiting Ensemble for enterprise application development, because of the Semantic Web backend that enables integration with data assets.

That goes to the argument TopQuadrant makes that these developments add to enterprise agility and speed to market. In this economic environment especially, "there is a sense that business people have to be involved to more rapidly develop and deliver the applications they need and the data integration they need," says co-founder and COO Robert Coyne.