| Stable release | 2.1.10 / July 19, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Written in | Java |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Platform | Java Virtual Machine |
| Type | Semantic Web |
| License | Open Software License |
| Website | http://mulgara.org/ |
Mulgara is a triplestore and fork of the original Kowari project. It is Open Source, scalable, and transaction-safe[1]. Mulgara instances can be queried via the iTQL query language and the SPARQL query language[2].
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Kowari was first made available for download in beta form on the 26th of October 2003[3]. In April 2004[4], Tucana Technologies Inc demonstrated the Tucana Knowledge Server (TKS), a proprietary RDF database relying on Kowari as the basis. A steady number of releases occurred throughout 2004, including version 1.0.5 and 1.1 pre-release. The development of TKS stalled due to difficulties with funding at the end of 2004 [5], while the development of Kowari continued on [6].
In September 2005, Tucana was bought by Northrop Grumman.[7] In January 2006, Northrop Grumman threatened a Kowari developer with legal action if he released any new version of Kowari[8]. As a consequence, Kowari was forked in July 2006. It was renamed to Mulgara as Northrop Grumman owned the Kowari trademark. All development on Kowari has stopped[9] and the community moved to Mulgara. The legal cloud surrounding Kowari was eventually resolved [10], one of the outcomes was the adoption of the Open Software License 3.0. Since 2008 all new code is being licensed with the Apache 2.0 License[11].
Since 2006 Mulgara 1.0.0 has been released, significant changes to the transaction architecture was made to support JTA, SPARQL support, a Jena API, and integration with Sesame has been added. As of February 16, 2010 the latest version is 2.1.7[12].
Mulgara is not based on a relational database due to the large numbers of table joins encountered by relational systems when dealing with metadata. Instead, Mulgara is a completely new database optimized for metadata management. Mulgara models hold metadata in the form of short subject-predicate-object statements, much like the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard. Metadata may be imported into or exported from Mulgara in RDF or Notation 3 form.[1]