Developing With BrightstarDBΒΆ

This section takes you through all of the basic principles of working with the BrightstarDB APIs.

BrightstarDB provides three different levels of API:

  1. At the highest level the Entity Framework allows you to define your application data model in code. You can then use LINQ to query the data and simple operations on your application data entities to create, update and delete objects.
  2. The Data Object Layer provides a simple abstract API for dealing with RDF resources, you can retrieve a resource and all its properties with a single call. This layer provides no direct query functionality, but it can be combined with the SPARQL query functionality provided by the RDF Client API. This layer also has a separate abstraction for use with Dynamic Objects.
  3. The RDF Client API provides the lowest level interface to BrightstarDB allowing you to add or remove RDF triples and to execute SPARQL queries.

If you are new to BrightstarDB and to RDF, we recommend you start with the Entity Framework and take a walk through our Developer Quick Start. If you are already comfortable with RDF and SPARQL you may wish to start with the lower level APIs.

If you are the kind of person that just likes to dive straight into sample code, please take a moment to read about Running the BrightstarDB Samples first.