Sophia

A Linked Data and Semantic Web toolkit for Rust

Pierre-Antoine Champin (Univ. de Lyon – UCBL – LIRIS)

Developers Track – The Web Conf 2020

Why Rust?
Why Sophia?
Present and Future

Why Rust?

Rust is a system programming language

(fine-grained control)

with high-level abstractions.

(genericity, polymorphism...)

“Rust emphasizes performance”

statically typed compiled language
zero-cost abstractions

“Rust emphasizes reliability”

i.e. memory-safe, thread-safe

Handled by Rust at compile time

Relatively young, yet mature (1.0 released in May 2015)
“Most beloved language” by Stack Overflow users 4 years in a row
Dynamic and welcoming community

Why Sophia?

Teaching myself Rust
An RDF implementation in Rust
A unified API for RDF in Rust (alla RDF-JS)

Zero-cost abstraction for RDF

in memory / on disk
speed / space
query / update
thread-safe?

Encouraging feedback...
... and contributions (@MarcAntoine-Arnaud, @althonos, @Tpt, @MattesWhite )

Present and Future

Uniform traits (~interfaces)

Term*
Triple / Quad
Graph / Dataset
Triple- / Quad-Stream

with default implementations

* currently a concrete type, but may become a trait soon

Graph & Dataset

Multiple in-memory implementations
- with various trade-offs
One persistent implementation
- based on Oxigraph by Thomas Tanon (@Tpt)

Syntaxes

	Parse	Serialize
RDF/XML	✔
N-Triples	✔	✔
N-Quads	✔	✔
Turtle	✔	🚧
TriG	✔
JSON-LD	🚧	✔*

* expanded form only, v0.5.0

Performances

What about the rest of the stack?

SPARQL: Not yet (except for Oxigraph)
RDFS/OWL: Thomas Bourg is working on a rule-based inference engine (based on Inferray)
N3: Matthias Farnbauer-Schmidt is working on Metis

Web Assembly

Julian Bruyat is porting Sophia to Web Assembly
The goal is to comply with RDF-JS

[Your contribution here]

Sophia is open-source
https://github.com/pchampin/sophia_rs

Thank you for your attention

Any question?

https://github.com/pchampin/sophia_rs

Appendix


						let mut graph: FastGraph =
							parser::turtle::parse_str(some_ttl).collect_triples();

						let ex = Namespace::new("http://example.org/")?;
						let foaf = Namespace::new("http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/")?;
						graph.insert(
							&ex.get("bob")?,
							&foaf.get("knows")?,
							&ex.get("alice")?,
						)?;

						let mut nts = NtSerializer::new_stringifier();
						let example2 = nts.serialize_graph(&mut graph)?.as_str();
						println!("The resulting graph\n{}", example2);

Sophia's generalized RDF model:

IRIs can be relative
Literals can be subjects*
Variables

* actually any term can occupy any role