Boosting RDF adoption in ruby with Goo

For the last year, the BioPortal team has been working on a new iteration that will incorporate major modifications to the existing services and architecture. As part of this work, we transitioned BioPortal to an architecture where RDF is the main data model and where triple stores are the main database systems. We have a component (called "Goo") that interacts with RDF data using SPARQL, and provides a clean API to perform CRUD operations on RDF stores. Using RDF and SPARQL for a real-world large-scale application creates challenges in terms of both scalability and technology adoption. In BioPortal, Goo helped us overcome that barrier using the technology that developers were familiar with, an ORM-alike API.