Poll: Future of SWRL support in TopBraid

[Holger Knublauch]

Dear users,

now that SPIN is a W3C submission, it has reached the same standard status
as SWRL. Furthermore, SPIN has key advantages to SWRL:

- It uses SPARQL - a standard supported by every RDF store
- Unlike SWRL, SPIN is an active effort. SWRL has been made obsolete by RIF
while SPIN is complementary to RIF

SWRL support in TopBraid has always been limited. This is not unique to
TopBraid. In general, SWRL has had little traction which is one of the key
reasons for it becoming obsolete. No major RDF stores or rules engines
support SWRL.

Because of this, rather than try to improve SWRL support, we want to focus
on creating a world class SPARQL Rules (SPIN) support. Our goal is to make
this direction clear and to avoid any unnecessary confusion for our users.
With this in mind we are planning to remove SWRL support from the upcoming
3.5 release. We would leave Jena rules support in.

To help us ensure that this will not adversely impact a large user group, we
are asking you to respond to this quick poll:

http://micropoll.com/t/KEs31ZByL8

Thank you
Holger

[Holger Knublauch]

Thanks to all who have responded. This has confirmed our assumptions, and the results were:

- not at all: 44%
- not very important, I can use SPIN or Jena rules instead: 44%
- important for my research: 11%
- important for production applications: 0%

TopBraid Suite 3.4 will be the last version with SWRL support for now. 3.5 will have greatly improved SPIN support instead.

Regards,
Holger

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