TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a “click and connect” process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical “information spaces” as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

TopBraid Live web services can also be used to make existing data available to semantically enabled search engines such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey. TopBraid Live 2.0 enables non-programmers to create and share web services that leverage semantic data stores, semantic queries, semantic reasoning and semantic search engines.

TopBraid Live 2.0 now includes SPARQLMotion Web Services and a Flex API. SPARQLMotion is a visual scripting language for semantic data processing. Visual scripts can be displayed and edited graphically by people without programming skills. Users can chain together simple processing steps to form complex processing pipelines. Data processing pipelines can be used to merge, search, query and mash-up data as well as to create a report or information dashboard. The SPARQLMotion Web Services function publishes SPARQLMotion scripts as web services, without requiring the user to learn any programming languages.

TopBraid Live 2.0 includes a client-side Flex API, which can be used to deliver dynamic, rich Internet applications using Adobe's platform-independent Flash Player. The TopBraid Flex API provides out-of-the-box components to display and edit semantically enabled information as tree structures, forms, graphs, tables, calendars, maps, or images. These components are integrated with a client-side object model that automatically synchronizes RDF and OWL semantic web data with the TopBraid Live server. Based on this architecture and API, application developers can develop semantic web applications from reusable components without having to implement or change the server.