TopBraid Technology
Overview
TopBraid technology stack offers a complete solution for services and applications that operate on Linked Data aka Knowledge Graphs
A Complete Solution for Services and Applications
TopBraid builds upon the Knowledge Graph standards, offering powerful tools for specifying business rules, describing user interfaces, providing web services and more. These standards include:
Knowledge Graphs: A Powerful Platform for Enterprise Data Integration
Knowledge graphs are an ideal and viable foundation for bridging and connecting enterprise metadata silos. Every resource in a TopBraid knowledge graph has a globally unique dereferenced web identifier – a URI. Thus, can be reliably referred to and accessed from any application.
Flexible
Graphs are the most flexible formal data structures (making it simple to map other data formats to graphs) that capture explicit relationships between items so that you can easily connect new data items as they are added and traverse the links to understand the connections.
Evolvable
Knowledge graphs are able to accommodate diverse data and metadata that adjusts and grows over time, much like living things do.
Intelligent
The semantics of data are explicit and include formalisms for supporting inferencing and data validation. As a self-descriptive data model, knowledge graphs enable data validation and can offer recommendations for how data may need to be adjusted to meet data model requirements.
Semantic
The meaning of the data is stored alongside the data in the graph, in the form of the ontologies or semantic models. This makes knowledge graphs self-descriptive.
Core Technology and Infrastructure
The foundation of TopBraid platform is RDF, which also serves as the base infrastructure of the Semantic Web and Linked Data. The platform implements W3C standards including RDF, RDFS, SHACL, SPARQL and OWL and provides rich capabilities on top of these technologies.
RDF data layer
TopBraid platform includes a scalable, transactional graph database for storing triples. Since most information today is stored in other formats, TopBraid dynamically accesses diverse data sources to bring their data into its knowledge graph.
Data validation and inferencing
Information need for data validation and reasoning is represented using SHACL constraints and rules. These are defined in a completely declarative manner, entirely in RDF. TopBraid offers rich reasoning capabilities using rules and integration with Machine Learning algorithms.
Templates and user interface components
As everything in the platform, these are implemented using RDF. SPARQL Web Pages make it possible to define user interfaces by annotating semantic models with appropriate visualizations. Smart integration with GraphQL lets you use all modern JavaScript libraries.
Change management
Maintains a history of all changes in the data. Audit trail includes timestamps and information about who made the change. It is also used to create sandboxed version of changes for automated workflows.
Data mapping
Represented in either SHACL or SPIN, provided through forward and backward chaining rules engines and declarative languages for defining mappings between models.
Data processing pipelines
Supported using SPARQLMotion, a declarative language with a visual notation and a corresponding engine. Scripts use pre-built modules for loading data, running transformations and exporting the results. SPARQLMotion is aimed at modelers and business analysts who want to use high level graphical tools.