RDFTL : An Event-Condition-Action Language for RDF

RDF is becoming a core technology in the Semantic Web. Providing the ability to describe metadata information that can be easily navigated, and the ease of storing it in existing relational database systems, have made RDF a very popular way of expressing and exchanging metadata information. However, the use of RDF in dynamic applications over distributed environments that require timely notification of metadata changes raises the need for mechanisms for monitoring and processing such a changes. Event-ConditionAction (ECA) rules are a natural candidate to fulfill this need. In this paper, we study ECA rules in the context of RDF metadata. We give a detailed description of a language to define ECA rules on RDF repositories. We specify the syntax and semantics of the language, and we illustrate its use by examples. We also describe the architecture of a system implementing this language, both for centralised and distributed environments.