Announcing the GrafSync platform

Graphifi are very happy to announce the first alpha release of our GrafSync platform. We are dedicated to providing platforms and tooling to make using knowledge graphs easier to create and manage. Additionally, we want to provide this cost effectively, so that all organisations can afford to benefit from the possibilities that graph technologies open up.

GrafSync joins the EasyGraph platform to create a powerful set of tooling for creation, management and delivery of knowledge graphs.The Graphifi team have many years of experience working with and building semantic platforms and tooling. We have put all of that knowledge into what we have been working on.

GrafSync as a platform works similarly to collaborative document editing systems such as Google Docs. However, GrafSync works directly with RDF, so applications are editing data rather than documents. It also provides some elements of OWL inferencing, such as inverse and symmetric processing. All of this happens in real time - users will immediately see updates to resources that other users are also editing.

The GrafSync platform is built on W3 standards such as RDF, OWL, SHACL and JSON-LD. It can be used with any RDF store that provides SPARQL support. Graphifi will be hosting GrafSync and the applications running on it as a cloud service.

Vocabulary (Taxonomy) management tooling tends to fall in to one of two camps - extremely expensive commercial enterprise software, or open source software that requires technical knowledge to get the most from it or that leaves something to be desired in user experience terms.

We want to address this gap with the Vocabulary and Ontology Managers, providing SaaS offerings that are affordable, comply with standards and are rich in features. We also don't believe in charging extra for features that most certainly should be available to all in the standard offering. An example is SKOS-XL support, where certain vendors want to charge you more for a very commonly needed feature.

It is also most definitely the direction for taxonomy management that SKOS and SKOS-XL are also not enough for many use cases. These require the additional power of ontologies, where additional classes and properties can be used to further enrich a taxonomy to provide a much richer graph of knowledge. The Ontology Manager features provide exactly this capability. Once an ontology is created (or imported) into the manager it can be configured for used with taxonomies and automatically becomes part of the information that can be edited for taxonomy concepts.

And this is just the start of things. On our very near term roadmap are features such as support for more OWL constructs in the Ontology Manager, versioning, workflow and history support for all applications, more inference capabilities in the GrafSync system, and more collaboration features. And our roadmap and prioritisation is most definitely going to be defined by the feedback that we receive from this and future releases - we want to provide software that does what people need it to do.

If you are interested in trying out the Vocabulary and Ontology Managers we would love to hear from you. Initially we would really like a small set of users to try it out and tell us what they think. Our plan is to gradually expand the set of users over time as we work towards a production release. Get in contact.