The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) graduated Rya, a scalable open-source Big Data database, to its list of Top-Level Projects (TLP). The project was submitted to the Apache Incubator in September 2015.
The database is triple store (subject-predicate-object) database, and is capable of storing billions of linked information sets by using novel storage methods, indexing schemes and query processing techniques that scale to billions of triples across multiple nodes.
The project is regarded as one of the most advanced database projects in the United States Department of the Navy, and it’s being used to power drones, advanced tactical communications, and supporting autonomous swarms of smaller robots, among numerous other applications. In addition, Apache Rya is being used for artificial intelligence projects involving semi-autonomous content production operations.
“We are very excited to reach this important milestone showing the maturity of the project and of the community around it,” said Dr. Adina Crainiceanu, vice president of Apache Rya and associate professor of computer science at the U.S. Naval Academy. “RDF (Resource Description Framework) triple data format is simple and flexible, making it easy to express diverse datasets such as connections between users on social media, financial data and transactions, medical data, and many others. Rya provides a scalable solution to store and query such data. The publication of the first research article about Rya garnered interest from industry, academia, and several government agencies. Bringing the project to ASF allowed collaboration and increased pace of development.”
