What’s New in RDFox v5.6: Highlighting Semantic Reasoning

With RDFox v5.6 comes a flurry of improvements: enhancing the Web Console to increase your efficiency when handling data; introducing a powerful, versatile way to interact with the RDFox Shell remotely; and an all-new tool to visualise semantic reasoning — the latest essential for data comprehension. Each, in its own way, will change the way you use RDFox from this day on.

How to Show Reasoning in an RDFox Knowledge Graph

By clicking 'Highlight reasoning", all derived edges in your graph will glow, and the rest will be dimmed.

One of the most exciting features to arrive in v5.6 is the new ‘highlight reasoning’ — allowing you to distinguish explicit and derived edges from one another in the data store explorer. Edges that exist as a consequence of rules can now be highlighted with the rest being dimmed to emphasize the extent to which the reasoner has enriched your data.

With vibrant and immediate feedback, this new view serves to make your life easier in two main ways. The first is by exposing a view of semantic inference in the system, increasing explainability for both your own benefit and that of others. The second makes it easier to spot any inferred edges that don’t belong, facilitating the debugging of rules.

New Features Helping You to Explore Your Data Store in the RDFox Web Console

How to Copy IRIs in the New Context Menus

In response to user feedback, the functionality of context menus has been expanded across the board. Not only have entirely new features been introduced, but they will now appear on edges too.

Highly awaited among the additions was the ability to copy node IRIs, however, RDFox v5.6 doesn’t stop there. You can now copy the IRIs (or labels where relevant) of all entities that appear in the graph, and even the entire fact when selecting an edge. These features, along with the ability to hide edges (as well as nodes), serve to streamline the process of exploring your data, reducing opportunities for error and helping you to work efficiently. Whether using the information within RDFox or for an external application, the copy button will soon become an invaluable tool.

What is the RDFox Remote Shell?

In RDFox v5.6 we have introduced a new experimental feature: the remote shell. This allows remote use of the RDFox shell, providing an incredibly useful tool for anyone using RDFox at a distance. Expanding access in this way allows you to trigger operations on remote servers using RDFox shell commands rather than having to resort to hand-written REST requests. This, for the first time, allows multiple users to use the shell interface simultaneously on the same server.

Connecting to the shell remotely is simple. While already having an instance of RDFox running, simply execute the following command in a new terminal.

RDFox [-role <role> -password <password>] remote <server-url> [<command> …]

See the RDFox documentation for more details.

Reasoning Engine Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes

As always we have continued to push the performance of RDFox to the absolute limit to maintain our proud title of the world’s most performant knowledge graph. Alongside that also come some bug fixes and optimisations to keep up our zero-tolerance for known errors and incredibly high standards of quality.

RDFox 5.6: Try it for yourself!

If you already have a license key for RDFox, you can download this latest version now. Otherwise if you’re new here, you can request a free trial and start your RDFox journey today!

If you’re in need of some inspiration for a project, check out our other blog posts for the exciting use cases and applications currently in action.