New build is now available

We are pleased to announce that v1.7-alpha build 1692 of -ontop- is now available for download.

The highlights of this build are:

• ontopPro now supports for Protege 4.2 
• Quest now supports LIMIT, OFFSET and ORDER BY in SPARQL queries
• Better SQL optimization in case of redundant JOINs and queries (less redundancy and simpler queries) which yields improved query execution performance.          
• Improved support for SQL parsing

Moreover, the protege plugin was extended with many GUI improvements, e.g., better GUI navigation, shortcuts, etc. And last, we worked a lot on improving error management and error reporting in this build. We are sure you will find this build even more stable than before. The full changelog can be found here [1].

Demo

An online demo video of -ontopPro- and Quest in virtual ABox mode can be found at [2].

Performance and Benchmarks

We would like share some exciting news. Our colleagues in Manchester benchmarked Quest in 'virtual ABox mode' (with MySQL as backend) against Virtuoso and MySQL in a very large data set. The results are currently under revision for publication and are very encouraging. They confirmed that in many cases, Quest is able to provide much better performance than Virtuoso, usually 6-10 times faster than Virtuoso, and up to 500 times faster in extreme cases. They also found that our performance is almost as good as using MySQL directly, which means that both, the SQL queries we generate are in many cases already optimal. We will put a link to their paper in our website as soon as the publication is officially out.

Next steps

The next release of the system will include two major new features. First we will finally allow for OPTIONAL in SPARQL queries, taking us closer to a full SPARQL 1.0 implementation (only unbound predicates will be missing, and will follow shortly). Second, we will include new 'Mapping Assistant' and 'Automated Mapping' features in -ontopPro- that will help you speed up the mapping development process.


Best regards,
The -ontop- Team

[1] https://babbage.inf.unibz.it/trac/obdapublic/wiki/ObdalibPluginChangeLog 
[2] http://obda.inf.unibz.it/protege-plugin/