For a full list of capabilities and packages please see TopBraid EDG page and visit our Help Portal for even more information.

Yes. You can combine any packages. You can also add additional packages incrementally. Adding a package does not require a re-install.

TopBraid EDG can enhance search strings with related information, such as providing data to convert a search for “Motrin” into a search for “Motrin OR Ibuprofen.” It can provide a search engine interface with data about broader, narrower, and related terms (or custom metadata designed for your enterprise’s needs), and it can also provide automated tagging tools with data to record such relationships to aid future searches. See Search for further information.

TopBraid EDG-VM has built in support for taxonomies using the W3C SKOS standard for the management of for managing taxonomies and thesauruses. Because SKOS is an RDF ontology, it can easily be extended by incorporating properties from well-known standards such as Dublin Core as well as properties custom-designed for your own needs. For defining ontologies, TopBraid EDG uses W3C SHACL and OWL standards. EDG’s metadata management package leverages many pre-built ontologies that describe technical, data and enterprise assets and relationships between them. These ontologies are expressed in SHACL and are configurable and extensible.

TopBraid EDG-VM offers a simple interface for managing taxonomies, thesauruses, and other controlled vocabularies, using SKOS and SKOS-XL as the model for that data. Any package of TopBraid EDG lets you create and manage any RDFS, SHACL or OWL ontology model and corresponding instance data that you like. All the specialized features for managing SKOS taxonomies—in particular, the workgroup collaboration features—are also available when you work with ontologies and all other asset collections.

Yes. TopBraid EDG Metadata Management package can import metadata about data sources using JDBC connector. It can also profile data sources and capture important statistics as technical metadata. In addition to the live connector through JDBC, you can also use DDL and other importers.

Yes. TopBraid EDG can infer connections between resources it manages using data shapes, rules and other mechanisms. For example, it can auto-build crosswalks between different vocabularies and datasets, it can connected data elements with relevant business terms and it can connect documents to terms.

Yes, if none of the pre-built EDG ontologies address your needs, you don’t have to use them. TopBraid EDG Custom Asset Collection Types module brings in Data Graphs which are designed to contain data based on a model you select at creation. This is similar to Reference Datasets where you chose the model describing dataset’s structure and semantics. Unlike Reference Datasets, Data Graphs are also free of any other assumptions. For example, you do not need to define a property containing a unique key (reference code) for a dataset.

With this module you can also create new asset collection types – pre-deciding ontology, editing features and other choices for your users.

Because EDG is web-based, it can be used from any popular web browser under any operating system. See Supported Platforms for further details on this and the EDG server platform.

A typical TopBraid EDG installation uses LDAP to handle authentication.

In addition to providing a SPARQL endpoint, TopBraid EDG has many built-in RESTful web services. The TopBraid platform makes it easy to add new specialized ones. Starting with release 6.0, TopBraid EDG supports GraphQL.

Yes, high availability is available when your deployment includes TopBraid EDG Data Platform.

Many people can get started using EDG once they have worked their way through the tutorial included with the documentation. To provide a more detailed understanding of TopBraid EDG, TopQuadrant provides a four-day course in which the first day covers features available to end users and the second through fourth day cover administrative and customization topics.

EDG performs reasoning (infers new facts) based on rules defined in SHACL, a standard language for defining semantic rules and constraints. SHACL page offers information on creating rules. There are different types of rules – some execute in a batch mode and results are stored and saved. Others execute dynamically at query time and their results are available for display and query but are never actually stored. In the first case, running rules requires triggering their execution – for example, by clicking on an action in the Transform tab. In the second case, rules execute anytime information is presented to a user or a query is submitted. SPIN rules are also supported.

All resources managed by EDG have names (labels). These names can be language tagged to capture names in different national languages. How resource names are displayed to the user is determined by the language preferences in user’s browser. Thus, two users can be looking at the same asset collection (e.g., the same taxonomy) and one would see concepts displayed in English and another would see them displayed in Chinese. The same goes for any textual information about concepts – e.g., definitions, notes, etc. Fields one see on the resource forms (e.g., ‘alternative label’, ‘definition’, ‘note’, etc.) are also resources. If they are given names in different languages, then users will see not only the value of a field in their preferred language, but also the field name as well.

Many users bring data in the tabular spreadsheet format. TopBraid EDG lets you map spreadsheet columns and save the mapping template for future use including automation of imports. There are also other ways to import data – for example, by connecting to a RDBMS (or any JDBC compatible source) or a content management system. Of course, RDF is directly loadable. You can import GraphQL Schemas and JSON data from GraphQL endpoints. You can also bring in XML data and, in general, any importer can be scripted using TopBraid Composer and many pre-built modules for converting data and running transformations.