TopBraid SPIN API now Open Source

Since the release of SPIN a few weeks ago, we already had several requests from people who would like to integrate SPIN functionality (SPARQL-based constraint checking, inferencing, user-defined functions) into their own applications. In order to encourage the wider adoption of SPIN in the community, we have therefore decided to make the key features of our SPIN implementation open source.

The TopBraid SPIN API is built on Jena and provides the following features:

• Converters between textual SPARQL syntax and the SPIN RDF Vocabulary
• A SPIN-based constraint checking engine (via spin:constraint)
• A SPIN-based inferencing engine (via spin:rule and spin:constructor)
• Support to execute user-defined SPIN functions using Jena/ARQ
• Support to execute user-defined SPIN templates

The license has been selected to allow open source projects (from universities etc) to use SPIN without further complications. For closed source users, we offer a commercial license that also provides business users assurance and support. With this policy we hope to encourage researchers to provide their (open source) implementations back to the community to help the SPIN community grow.

The SPIN API is currently in beta, and the official 1.0 release is scheduled in conjunction with TopBraid 3.0 in the next few weeks. We appreciate your feedback in the meantime.