Developers

History

4store was designed by Steve Harris at Garlik from 2006 onwards. The original design brief was a RDF store to hold one billion triples, an ambitious goal at that time. The final system was capable of holding 10+ billion triples, and has been a core part of the Garlik infrastructure ever since. Steve can be contacted at if you have any questions about the design.

4store was primarily developed by Steve Harris and Nick Lamb. Nick did the work on the clustering infrastructure, HTTP server and protocol. Steve mainly worked on the query engine and low-level index storage code.

4store is the logical successor to 3store, though it shares no code or design in common. For it's time, 3store was considered scalable (around 50MT was achievable on a single server in 2002).

Contributing

If you would like to contribute work to 4store, please contact the developers on the mailing list for advice, or look at the TODO list.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. [read more]

RDF

RDF is a data language used to express triples, expressing the data underlying the Semantic Web. [read more]

SPARQL

SPARQL is a RDF Query Language, a key Semantic Web technology. 4store uses SPARQL and the SPARQL Protocol for access to all it's internal data. [read more]