Re: RDF ruby toolkit consolidation

Since writing my blog post I've run across some other interesting libraries
on RubyForge.

RDF.rb
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rdfrb/

SPARQL.rb
http://rubyforge.org/projects/sparql/


Also interesting are RDFBus
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rdfbus/

and Bitfuse
http://rubyforge.org/projects/bitfuse/

None of these projects have released anything, but I've look through the
code in Subversion, and there is a good start there. Just to fragment things
even more, I wrote a little library for parsing and manipulating RDF. It's
linked from by blog post. I didn't create a RubyForge project for it because
I didn't want to add to the fragmentation. I believe my library is fully
complaint with the RDF spec, and it has an NTriples parser, but no RDF/XML
support.

What I'd like to see isn't necessarily one library to rule them all, but I'd
like to see at least one fully compliant, actively maintained RDF library.
More than one would be OK.

I think probably the most critical piece of this all is a Ruby-based RDF
reasoner. It wouldn't have to be something that is integrated into any
particular library. I suppose it could be a separate gem, but I think it's
hard to get excited about an RDF graph without any entailment. ActiveRDF's
stance has been that reasoning belongs in the triple store where it can be
tuned and optimized, and I don't disagree with that, but I think having a
pure Ruby library that is easy to install and allows you to do some fun
stuff out of the box is a big win. You can always switch to a reasoning
triple store later. I also did some work on that for ActiveRDF. I did a gem
called ActiveRDF Rules that did forward chaining reasoning on the RDF graph.
It isn't the best implementation. It was really just a one-off project for
me. A better solution would be a backwards chaining reasoner.

OK, I think that's enough of a ramble for now. :) Hopefully we can get the
right people interested in this.


Paul

On 2/8/08, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> It seems that several of us are thinking along similar lines. I've just
> written http://danbri.org/words/2008/02/08/270 after a chat with Rich
> Kilmer last week, while Paul Stadig recently wrote
>
http://paul.stadig.name/2007/11/07/the-state-of-rdf-support-in-ruby-2007-conclusion/
>
>
> It is time to pull together the scattered aspects of RDF in Ruby, and
> make something that a bit more integrated. I don't have time to code it
> myself but I'll be running round trying to persuade others to do so :)
>
> Who here has time to collaborate on the creation of a unified, robust
> and modular RDF toolkit that could serve as a foundation for other more
> specialist toolkits, as well as for user-facing applications that need a
> simple way to parse and navigate RDF/XML?
>
>
> As a reminder if you want to get others on this list,
>
>         If you're interested in collaborating on Ruby tools for RDF,
>         please join the public-rdf-ruby@w3.org mailing list at W3C. Just
>         send a note to public-rdf-ruby-request@w3.org with a subject
>         line of "subscribe".
>
> There are archives at
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-ruby/ (I can get the
> homepage of the archives updated if we want to point at more recent work).
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> ps. for a wiki, we could surely use http://esw.w3.org/topic/ unless
> there is one in the ruby world that everyone uses
>
> --
> http://danbri.org/
>
>