What is Virtuoso?

[http://www.openlinksw.com/]

OpenLink Software is an acclaimed technology innovator and leading vendor of standards compliant middleware.

[http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/VOSIntro]
Virtuoso OpenSource Edition Introduction

OpenLink Software announces the open source licensing of most of its Virtuoso product. All the database, WebDAV/web server and SOA functions of Virtuoso are part of the open source release. There is a commercial release which additionally features virtual database and replication capabilities.

What is Virtuoso?

At core, Virtuoso is a high-performance object-relational SQL database. As a database, it provides transactions, a smart SQL compiler, powerful stored-procedure language with optional Java and .Net server-side hosting, hot backup, SQL-99 support and more. It has all major data-access interfaces, such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO .Net and OLE/DB.

Virtuoso has a built-in web server which can serve dynamic web pages written in Virtuoso's web language (VSP) as well as PHP, ASP .net and others. This same web server provides SOAP and REST access to Virtuoso stored procedures, supporting a broad set of WS protocols such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging and others. A BPEL4WS run time is also available as part of Virtuoso's SOA suite.

Virtuoso has a built-in WebDAV repository. This can host static and dynamic web content and optionally provides versioning. The WebDAV repository is tested to interoperate with WebDAV clients built into Windows XP, Mac OSX and others and makes Virtuoso a convenient and secure place for keeping one's files on the net. Further, Virtuoso provides automatic metadata extraction and full text searching for supported content types.

OpenLink Virtuoso supports SPARQL embedded into SQL for querying RDF data stored in Virtuoso's database. SPARQL benefits from low-level support in the engine itself, such as SPARQL-aware type-casting rules and a dedicated IRI data type. This is the newest and fastest developing area in Virtuoso.

 

The Initial Open Source Release

Virtuoso can be downloaded at this site in source and binary form for Linux and various Unix's. A Windows binary distribution is also available.

Future

Virtuoso is the subject of intensive ongoing development. This is divided into the following areas:

• RDF and Semantic Web - we will extend the present RDF capability to transparently access native relational data and have more storage configuration options and inferencing support.
• Packaging - We will introduce a stripped-down database-only configuration of about the same size as other open-source DBMS distributions
• Applications - We plan to offer a blog, wiki, file sharing and other applications developed and hosted on Virtuoso OpenSource Edition.
• Windows build project - Currently Virtuoso OpenSource Edition can be built on most Unixes. A separate build system for Win32 and Win64 will be provided as MS Visual Studio projects, complete with Windows binary installers. The commercial release is available for all current Windows operating systems.
• Much new developer-oriented documentation, concerning extending Virtuoso, hosting of non-Virtuoso content, extending DAV, technical articles on using specific areas of functionality.

The Virtuoso OpenSource Edition News page and the blogs will track these developments as they unfold.