Neosemantics 4.0 is out!
Don’t miss the live stream session on neosemantics 4.0 and the new Graph App on 19 May at 7am PDT/ 10am EDT/ 2pm GMT/3pm BST/ 4pm CEST!
Introduction
Neosemantics (n10s) is a Neo4j plugin that enables the use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) in Neo4j and is part of the Neo4j Labs program.
RDF is a W3C standard model for data interchange.
Some key features of neosemantics are:
- Store RDF data in Neo4j in a lossless manner (imported RDF can subsequently be exported without losing a single triple in the process)
- On-demand export property graph data from Neo4j as RDF
For those of you who want to get an idea of the kinds of things you can do with neosemantics, check out Jesus Barrasa’s collection of blog posts on the subject. The OpenPermID post, based on the Refinitiv data, is an excellent example.
Neosemantics 4.0 is now available!
It has been nearly 5 months since the last 3.5.x release. Based on in-depth interactions with Neo4j users at our community forum, as well as through GitHub, as well as the monumental release of Neo4j 4.0, it was time for a new and improved version of neosemantics.
Over the past few weeks, we have quietly released the first generally available (GA) version of neosemantics, compatible with Neo4j 4.0.
It includes some great new features that we are really excited about:
- Support for Neo4j multi-database through the RDF endpoint
- Persisted Graph Configurations
- Model Validations based on Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL)
- Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) import
They’re all described in detail, in the manual.
We also thought it was a good time to introduce some significant API changes in the library to improve usability for developers. The main two are — a good restructuring of the naming scheme; and a change to the mode of operation of the plugin.
Now the Graph Configuration is persisted, instead of passing it on every individual request. This has arisen as we are seeing neosemantics being used in multi-step workflows, involving numerous imports/exports/updates. Neosemantics is not just a data migration tool anymore, which was the original use-case when it was created back in 2016.
For those of you using the 3.5 version of neosemantics, we’ve added a guide in the manual to aid transition to 4.0.
Under the hood, as usual, all the parsing and serialising of RDF is done using the amazing RDF4J framework, which we’ve also upgraded in this last release to v.3.2.0.
There’s also an app for that
In parallel with the release of neosemantics 4.0, we’ve also released a neosemantics GraphApp (built by Adam Cowley) to help you get familiar with some of the main features of the neosemantics toolkit through a nice and friendly user interface.
You can install and run the GraphApp within Neo4j Desktop.
What’s next?
As you may have read in some of the posts we’ve published on using neosemantics (Mark Needham’s post on COVID-19 taxonomy graph, Jesús Barrasa on how to enrich your Neo4j Knowledge Graph by querying Wikidata), one of the things we find more useful is querying public SPARQL endpoints like Wikidata, UniProt and many others.
In the next release of the GraphApp we’re planning to include a user-friendly interface to simplify the process of connecting to such public SPARQL endpoints. This will make the import of RDF data into Neo4j a two-click process. We’ll include a catalogue with some of the most popular ones but here’s a call to action — If you manage or are aware of a data set/data platform accessible via SPARQL, and you want it included in the catalogue of the app, please give us a shout through the community portal and we’ll have it included.
Get involved!
Please keep sharing your experiences through the community portal and submit your issues on GitHub.
Thank you from the neosemantics team!
Don’t miss the live stream session on neosemantics 4.0 and the new Graph App on 19 May at 7am PDT/ 10am EDT/ 2pm GMT/3pm BST/ 4pm CEST!
