The JISC have funded the MILARQ Project, to enhance the execution speed of queries against the CLAROS data web. By the project end in October 2010, our hope is to enable the public release of a robust and performant publicly accessible search interface, the CLAROS Explorer, to be used by academic researchers, educators, students and members of the public to access the rich set of classical art resources available from the CLAROS Partners.
The MILARQ Project will start in March 2010. MILARQ is a small technical development project designed to enhance the performance of the CLAROS data web to a level that will enable public release of CLAROS, allowing wider public access to a rich set of classical art resources from the participating major European research centres.
This will be accomplished by software developments relating to Jena, the widely used open source Semantic Web data management platform employed by the CLAROS data web, specifically the creation of multiple indexes over the underlying RDF triple store, Jena TDB, and other optimizations relating to filter performance, thereby speeding the execution of more complex SPARQL queries against the stored data.
The intended outcome of this project is that of enabling the public release, by the project end in October 2010, of a robust and performant publicly accessible search interface, the CLAROS Explorer, to be used by academic researchers, educators, students and members of the public to access information about objects from classical antiquity, and their relationships with classical mythology, although this cannot be guaranteed at the outset.
The MILARQ Project, whose PI is Dr David Shotton of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group (IBRG) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, will run for 8 months from March 2010. It will involve 25% of the time of Graham Klyne, IBRG's lead developer and creator of the CLAROS data web, and the services of Dave Reynolds and his colleagues at Epimorphics Ltd of Bristol on a consultancy basis for software development. The Epimorphics staff first developed Jena while working in the Semantic Web Group at HP Labs in Bristol, and are best placed to ensure that the improvements created are efficient and suitable for integration into the open source Jena code base, and thus will be supported on an ongoing basis.
The MILARQ Project, in addition to creating performance benefits for the CLAROS data web, is anticipated to bring broad benefits for the Jena user community as a whole.
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