Dear Apache Jena Community, I am Craig Turrell, the Head of Design and AI at Standard Chartered. My team and I have been using Apache Jena extensively for semantic web applications and appreciate its robust foundation for RDF data management.
After working with Jena on multiple large-scale knowledge graph projects, we've identified several areas where we believe we could contribute meaningful architectural improvements to help Jena better serve modern, AI-integrated semantic web applications. We've conducted extensive research on these limitations and potential solutions, and we're excited about the possibility of working with the community to implement enhancements. The key areas we're interested in addressing include: 1. *Horizontal scaling beyond single-machine constraints* - Extending Jena's capabilities for truly distributed datasets by building upon existing work like RDF-Delta and Fuseki-Kafka 2. *Memory management optimizations for large datasets* - Improving handling of billion-triple graphs through enhanced encoding, caching, and integration with formats like HDT 3. *Enhanced reasoning capabilities* - Extending support for more expressive ontology reasoning and building on the recent Jena-ontapi module 4. *Native vector support for AI integration* - Adding capabilities for embedding storage and similarity search to bridge RDF and vector-based AI models Based on our research of successful contribution patterns in Apache projects, we're proposing a phased approach, starting with incremental improvements to horizontal scaling while maintaining backward compatibility. We understand the importance of community involvement, comprehensive testing, and thorough documentation. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on: - Whether these areas align with the current project roadmap and community interests - Suggestions for which specific limitations would be most valuable to address first - Guidance on the best way to proceed with initial contributions - Any existing work or discussions related to these areas that we should be aware of I've reviewed the contribution guidelines and am ready to create GitHub issues and submit PRs for specific improvements once we have better alignment with the community's priorities. Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to your thoughts and to potentially becoming active contributors to this important project. Best regards, Craig Turrell craig.turr...@sc.com
