Stored Procedures for the Web
This morning, I gave a talk at the Scripting for the Semantic Web workshop on my paper Extensible SPARQL Functions With Embedded Javascript.
The paper presents an extension to SPARQL whereby extension functions (allowing arbitrary code to act as a result filter) may be dynamically added to the endpoint at runtime. Although I didn’t present the work in this context, this is essentially stored procedures for the web. Functions are identified by URIs which can be dereferenced to get the implementation source code. The functions can be retrieved on the fly by the server, compiled locally, and run against a query’s result set. Source code can be signed to provide some level of trust, and the SPARQL engine can rely on the signatures to prevent untrusted code from running.
There’s more information in the paper, and the (somewhat sparse) presentation slides.