The open-source Apache Rya database (Rya) is a resource description framework (RDF) triple store database. The project started at the U.S. government's Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences with an initial research paper published in 2012. The project joined the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as an incubated project in 2015. In September 2019, it achieved the Top-Level Project status, which is an indication and validation of the project's maturity, code quality, and community.
The project was initiated to address the need for a scalable RDF triple store, and no existing system met all the requirements. The complexity in implementing a triple store comes in how to make SPARQL--the query language used for querying RDF--queries fast because there is so much data and the format is simple. That is where Rya fits in; trying to make SPARQL, queries fast for triple store databases. From an architecture standpoint, Rya can be deployed on top of Apache Accumulo, which is a distributed key/value store and can optionally also use MongoDB as a data store.
Among Rya's users, today is the U.S. Navy, which is using the open-source technology for numerous efforts, including one for autonomous drones. Another user has deployed Rya using both the Apache Accumulo and MongoDB backends, for storing triples to express extracted concepts, entities and relationships in one of their products.
The priority of the Apache Rya's project now is to continue building a community of developers who want to contribute and help grow an open-source project as well as the technology. Furthermore, a key focus for future releases of Rya is standardization. One such effort is with Rya's implementation of the SPARQL standard, which has gone through multiple iterations in recent years.
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