Linked Data Research Centre, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Galway)

Sigma EE is an off-the-shelf user interface component for accessing data on an organisation’s “RDF bus”.

Data integration projects have to show “quick wins”. In the early project phase, should resources be devoted to creating custom adapters to the organisation’s most important data sources? Or should they be devoted to creating initial user interfaces that allow for effective demonstration of the project’s benefits? In projects that use the W3C’s RDF data model and RDF standards, Sigma EE supports quick wins by providing search and browsing services early on, with minimal configuration costs.

Enterprise Search and Enterprise Information Integration — providing uniform user interfaces for access to information that is scattered across a large number of different data sources, documents, databases and other information systems — is an ongoing IT challenge. Recently, architectures that use the RDF standards to address this problem have become more popular. RDF-based approaches promise lower up-front cost, allow the use of off-the-shelf components (data stores, query languages, data source adapters), and integrate more easily with external data sources on the Web (Linked Data, RDFa, microformats). Typical architectures feature an “RDF bus”, to which all data source adapters connect. Front-end interfaces tap into the RDF bus to provide end-user services such as search, browsing, recommendations of related items, reporting, dashboarding, notifications and so on.

In different projects, details of how RDF busses are realised vary with the specific requirements and environment, but the use of RDF standards allow the provision of fundamental services, including search and browsing, regardless of implementation details. This is what the Sigma EE component provides.

Sigma EE uses industry standards to connect to data source adapters, RDF stores, and existing search indexes. Supported protocols include OpenSearch, Atom, XML+XSLT, Solr, SPARQL, and Linked Data.

Sigma EE is based on Sig.ma (http://sig.ma/), a user interface for exploring the emerging Web of Data. Sig.ma is built on top of the Sindice and Yahoo BOSS structured data search services. Thanks to these roots as a UI for open Web data, Sigma EE has strong features for handling information provenance and heterogenous, non-aligned data.