OSF: The Open Semantic Framework

The Open Semantic Framework is a complete and integrated software stack that combines external open source components with specific enhancements developed by Structured Dynamics. OSF is a complete foundation to bring semantic technology capabilities to the enterprise. OSF has a variety of potential applications from enterprise information integration to collaboration networks and open government.

OSF can integrate and manage all types of content — unstructured documents, semi-structured files, spreadsheets, and structured databases — using a variety of best-of-breed engines. All external content is converted to the canonical RDF data model, enabling common tools and methods for tagging and managing all content. Ontologies provide the schema and common vocabularies for integrating across diverse datasets. These capabilities can be layered over existing information assets for unprecedented levels of integration and connectivity. All information within OSF may be powerfully searched and faceted, with results datasets available for export in a variety of formats and as linked data.

The OSF stack consists of multiple layers. In the standard configuration, there is tight integration with Drupal 7 and its leading modules, enabling use of OSF with standard Drupal interfaces and constructs. All interactions with OSF occur via a robust layer of nearly 30 Web services and their associated APIs, which abstract and simplify how to interact with the stack. The OSF engines layer provides RDF and OWL management capabilities using the proven Virtuoso (RDF), Solr (search), OWL API (ontologies) and GATE (tagging and NLP) standalone applications. Besides Drupal and these engines, all remaining OSF components and Web services have been developed specifically to achieve the complete architecture of the Open Semantic Framework. OSF has been developed over five years and is now in version 3.x.

OSF features an automatic installer that retrieves and then installs all components in the stack. It is supported by a variety of command-line tools useful for managing the ontologies and datasets used within OSF, as well as permissions management and unit and systems integration testing. The Open Semantic Framework is supported by a comprehensive library of open-source documentation comprising more than 500 articles and associated figures and diagrams.