[redland] Redland News 2000-10-13

[Dave Beckett]

I've been working at W3C in Boston this week and talking a lot to the
RDF people here - Ralph Swick (RDF M&S co-editor), Dan Brickley (RDF
Schema co-editor, also my colleage at Bristol) and the developers
using RDF here for their Amaya annotation project - Art Barstow and
Marja-Riitta Koivunen (as well as other such as Dan Connolly by
phone and the MIT Dspace project people - http://web.mit.edu/dspace/ ).

The outcomes of these discussions have been a better (not yet
complete) understanding of some of the issues I have been ignoring
about some key concepts such as Reifiication (talking about
statements and referring to them).  This will require some changes to
APIs, some of which will be visible:

* Adding a statement to a model will now return a URI to it for use
  in referring to it (previously just returned success/failure bool)

* Statements, Bags, ... concepts have to be usable as Resources so
  you can use them where you would use a Resource, to construct
  Statements etc.

I've done the latter already, and the existing examples seem to work.

There was also talk of the RDF parser I was developing in a SAX-like
way and whether it could be separate from Redland for applications
that didn't want all of the functionality or complexity that I
provide.  I felt this was a useful thing to do and so I'll design it
with that goal.  Unfortunately I'll have to think of another cute
name for this package.  Hmm.

Just after the 0.9.4 release I found a bug in the perl code and I've
fixed it in the development version.  The patch is available at:

  http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/dist/source/patches/0.9.4/patch1

If you want to see post-release work, there is a development area on
the LXR source site that I update from time to time (usually after a
series of CVS commits).  See this at:

  http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/lxr/source/?v=devel

Finally, I've been talking to James Tauber (Redfoot python RDF) and
Jason Diamond (C RDF parser) about cooperation and it looks
encouraging.

Dave