I am Orri Erling, program manager for Virtuoso at OpenLink Software. This blog is about any and all aspects of technology that have to do with Virtuoso.

The launch of Virtuoso Open Source Edition (VOS) marks a new period in our participation in the database world. We will henceforth be much more active, publish much more material, have a faster release cycle and actively reach out to the various areas of the open source community.

We have years worth of demos, white papers, articles, a suite of Virtuoso based applications, and much more that we will be unveiling over the following months.

We will track different aspects of Virtuoso work on this and related blogs. In the middle term, we will talk about the following:

  • RDF, SPARQL and semantic web work - The initial VOS release has SPARQL support and this will continue to be refined and optimized. We will introduce SPARQL benchmark suites and the like as these become ready.
  • Relational database - Virtuoso's extensible SQL and relational storage engine is the platform on which all the rest stands. Thus this continues to be improved, ranging from low level database engine work to SQL optimizations to various developer convenience features. A database-only configuration of Virtuoso is another possibility.
  • DAV and web services - Web services are the main entry point for all Virtuoso's features. These may eventually become more significant than the traditional SQL client interfaces, of which Virtuoso supports several.

There is a whole suite of next generation file server features to be unveiled. These include items such as automatic metadata extraction and logical views on content based on its metadata, permissions etc.

In the immediate future, we will:

  • Keep enhancing the VOS wiki and edit the existing base of unpublished material to be ready for publication on this platform.
  • Keep adding to technical notes and FAQ's on compiling and running on different platforms and using the different run time hosting options of Virtuoso.

The VOS development CVS will be updated at high frequency, in some areas even weekly. Stable snapshots will be made available 3 or 4 times a year.

We will have a very exciting spring, with radically more participation in the database and open source worlds than ever. Look for frequent updates on this blog.