ARC2

ARC2 is a PHP 7.2 library for working with RDF. It also provides a MySQL-based triplestore with SPARQL support. Older versions of PHP may work, but are not longer tested.

Documentation

For the documentation, see the Wiki. To quickly get started, see the Getting started guide.

Installation

Package available on Composer.

If you're using Composer to manage dependencies, you can use

composer require semsol/arc2:^2

Further information about composer usage can be found here, for instance about autoloading ARC2 classes.

Requirements

PHP

(1) It is compatible with PHP 5.3+ but old versions are no longer tested.

Database systems

(1) As long as ARC2 uses mysqli, a connection to MySQL Server 8.0 is not possible. For more information, please look here. But its planned to switch to PDO (issue)

(2) Not tested anymore, because outdated version.

RDF triple store

SPARQL support

Please have a look into SPARQL-support.md to see which SPARQL 1.0/1.1 features are currently supported.

Use cache

The RDF store implementation provides a hash-based query cache. It works on two levels: SQL and SPARQL, which means, that it checks given SPARQL queries as well as internally generated SQL queries.

To use it, just add the following to the database configuration:

$store = ARC2::getStore(array(
    'db_name' => 'testdb',
    'db_user' => 'root',
    'db_pwd'  => '',
    'db_host' => '127.0.0.1',
    // ...
    'cache_enabled' => true // <== activates cache
));

Per default it uses a file based cache, which stores items in the default temp folder of the system (in Linux its usually /tmp). But you can use another cache solution, such as memcached.

PSR-16 compatibility

Our cache solution is PSR-16 compatible, which means, that you can use your own cache instance. To do that, add the following to the database configuration:

$store = ARC2::getStore(array(
    'db_name' => 'testdb',
    'db_user' => 'root',
    'db_pwd'  => '',
    'db_host' => '127.0.0.1',
    // ...
    'cache_enabled' => true
    'cache_instance' => new ArrayCache() // <=== example Cache instance, managed by yourself
));

ARC2 uses Symfony Cache , which provides many connectors out of the box (Overview).

Known problems/restrictions with database systems

In this section you find known problems with MariaDB or MySQL, regarding certain features. E.g. MySQL 5.5 doesn't allow FULLTEXT indexes in InnoDB. We try to encapsulate any differences in the DB adapters, so that you don't have to care about them. In case you run into problems, this section might be of help.

MySQL 8.0 and mysqli

Using mysqli with MySQL 8.0 as backend throws the following exception:

mysqli_connect(): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password]

Based on this source, one has to change the my.cnf, adding the following entry:

[mysqld] default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password

Internal information for developers

Please have a look here to find information about maintaining and extending ARC2 as well as our docker setup for local development.