Integrating SciSPARQL and MATLAB

Sammanfattning: Nowadays many scientific experiment results involve multi-dimensional arrays. It is desirable to store these results in a persistent way and make queries against not only well-structured data objects like arrays but also the metadata that describe the experiments. SPARQL is a Semantic Web standard query language for data and metadata stored in terms of RDF. SciSPARQL is an extended version of SPARQL designed for scientific applications. It includes numeric multi-dimensional array operations and user-defined functions. The SciSPARQL Database Manager (SSDM) is a query processing engine for SciSPARQL. MATLAB is a popular and powerful scientific computing application programming language. We implemented an interface between MATLAB and SciSPARQL called MATLAB SciSPARQL Link (MSL). MSL provides SciSPARQL queries in MATLAB through a client/server interface. It optionally also provides an interface to enable calls to MATLAB in SciSPARQL queries.  With MSL MATLAB users can populate, update, and query SSDM databases it in terms of SciSPARQL queries. For the implementation we use C interfaces of MATLAB and SSDM, and the networking capabilities of SSDM. The DLL we made extends MATLAB with MSL interface functions.