The resource action language: Towards designing reactive RDF stores

Abstract

In an interconnected world such as the one envisioned by pervasive computing, systems should be able to react to stimuli received from the environment in a streaming fashion. Reactions may include not only performing local updates, but also sending and asking for information from other systems, waiting for responses, and requesting for changes. In this paper we give a short introduction to the main principles of a language we are developing to achieve that, ReAL. Key elements of ReAL in that context include the introduction of explicit operators to deal with concurrency, nested transactions, and streams. Based on these operators we show how interaction with external services could be enabled. In the future we plan to evaluate further the most innovative operators, define the semantics of ReAL, and analyze its relation to SPARQL, the standard Semantic Web query language.