doc-overview

Go to the documentation of this file.

namespace Dataquay {
 
/** \mainpage Dataquay
 
\section about About Dataquay
 
%Dataquay is a free open source library that provides a friendly C++
API for the Redland and Sord RDF data stores using Qt4 classes and
containers.
 
%Dataquay is intended to be simple to use and easy to integrate. It is
principally intended for use in Qt-based applications that would like
to use an RDF datastore as backing for in-memory project data, to
avoid having to provide application data-specific file formats and to
make it easy to augment the data with descriptive metadata pulled in
from external sources. %Dataquay is also intended to be useful for
applications whose primary purpose is not related to RDF but that have
ad-hoc RDF needs for metadata management.
 
\section contents What's in Dataquay?
 
%Dataquay contains C++ abstractions for the RDF Node and Triple
(or statement), and for the RDF Store.  The standard BasicStore offers
simple add, remove, matching, and querying functions and file I/O.
 
Also provided is TransactionalStore, a transactional interface to the
store that offers per-thread isolation, atomic commit, and a
Connection class in the style of a traditional relational database
interface.
 
%Dataquay also offers ObjectMapper, a facility which can take care of
a complete object hierarchy, map it to the RDF store, and synchronise
in both directions any changes to the hierarchy or the store.
Arbitrary mappings between C++ class and property names and RDF URIs
can be specified using TypeMapping.  The mapping is flexible enough to
allow you to load many publicly generated Linked Data sources directly
into object class hierarchies, if you wish (although this is not
usually an ideal way to handle unpredictable data sources).  The
classes that manage the object-to-store and store-to-object mapping
can also be used separately, as ObjectStorer and ObjectLoader.
 
\section start Start Here...
 
If you want your application to have access to RDF metadata but you
are not intending to make RDF data the core of the application, then
you probably want to focus on BasicStore.  This can load and save RDF
and perform queries, matches, and updates in a simple form.
 
If you need to carry out updates to RDF data, particularly in a
multi-threaded application, then you should look at TransactionalStore
and its related Connection class.
 
If you would like to use an RDF store as a "hibernation" mechanism for
store and recall of an object hierarchy in an open and portable
manner, then you could consider using a BasicStore, wrapping that in a
TransactionalStore, and using ObjectMapper to deal with the
hibernation side of things.
 
In any of these cases you'll also want to look closely at the Uri,
Node, and Triple classes.
 
\section status Development Status
 
Certain aspects of %Dataquay are still somewhat provisional, and the
API may continue to change until the 1.0 release.  However, most of
the API design is likely to remain as it is now and the library has
been reasonably well tested.  The main focus for 1.0 is to expand the
test suite and produce some more example code.  Those activities might
show up other things that need doing too, though.
 
\section licence Licence
 
%Dataquay is published under a liberal BSD-style licence, similar to
(and of course compatible with) the Apache licence used by Redland.
You can use it without fee in open-source or proprietary applications.
See the COPYING file for details.
 
*/
 
}