Git meets Linked Data – A Tale of an Unusual Architecture

In 2025 we wrote a software system supporting an EU funded research project. What started as a run-of-the-mill client-server-database architecture grew into an unusual combination of technologies: We use Linked Data and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) in the form of Apache Jena as the data model and git – yes, the source code management tool – as our storage system. These technological choices weren’t rooted in a desire for novelty. They were derived as straightforward consequences from our requirements. Thanks to functional software architecture principles such as simple, and precise specifications based on pure functions, what could have become a hard to maintain Frankensteinian mess has actually evolved into reasonable, maintainable, and well-performant software.

Markus Schlegel

Markus is a functional software architect at Active Group GmbH in Tübingen, Germany. He tries to liberate programming from the von Neumann bottleneck since 1991. Markus is interested in a diverse set of technologies ranging from GUI design to concurrency and formal methods.