Scalable and Reactive Programming for Semantic Web Developers

The Semantic Web brings a powerful set of concepts, standards and ideas that are already changing the shape of the Web. However, in order to put these notions into practice we need to translate them into code. That is why the broad notion of programming the Semantic Web is important, even if it remains challenging to provide the appropriate tools for developers to implement these ideas. In this work, we present our experience in a series of common Semantic Web programming tasks, and how we improve the developer experience and productivity by providing a simple Domain Specific Language (DSL) in Scala. We exemplify its use through fundamental tasks such as dealing with RDF data and ontologies, or performing reasoning and querying using JVM languages. In particular, we show how we can profit from the intrinsic extensibility of the Scala language to simplify these tasks using a custom DSL, at the same time that we introduce principles of reactivity and scalability in the code.