Release RDF.rb version 0.3.4

I just pushed out a fairly significant update to RDF.rb, as I mentioned I would the other week.


After several months of gathering updates for RDF.rb [1], we’ve released version 0.3.4 with several new features:

 *   Update to BGP query model to support SPARQL semantics,
 *   Expandable Litereal support, to allow further implementation of XSD datatypes outside of RDF.rb (see RDF::XSD gem [2]),
 *   More advanced content type detection to allow better selection of the appropriate reader from those available on the client. (Includes selecting among HTML types, such as Microdata and RDFa)
 *   Improved CLI with the rdf executable providing access to all loaded readers and writers for cross-language serialization and deserialization.</http:>

As an example of format detection, consider the following:

require 'linkeddata'
RDF::Graph.load("http://greggkellogg.net/foaf.ttl")


should load Turtle or N3 readers if installed. This becomes more important for ambiguous file types, such as HTML, which could be either RDFa or Microdata, and application/xml, which could be TriX, RDF/XML or even RDFa.

See documentation [3] for more specifics on this version of RDF.rb. Note that I’ve attempted to incorporate suggestions for improving the documentation.

Most of the reader/writer gems have been updated to match this release, in particular JSON::LD<http://rubygems.org/gems/json-ld>, RDF::Microdata<http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-microdata>, RDF::N3<http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-n3>, RDF::RDFa<http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-rdfa>, RDF::RDFXML<http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-rdfxml>, andRDF::Turtle<http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-turtle>. A future update to the linkeddata<http://rubygems.org/gems/linkeddata> gem should reference the latest versions of each, but a simple gem update will work too.

There is a slight semantic change for repositories to support SPARQL: a context of false should not match a variable context. This is straight out of SPARQL semantics. Repository implementors who have provided custom implementations of#query_pattern should check behavior against rdf-spec version 0.3.4 to verify correct operation.

Next up is a release of SPARQL implemented in pure Ruby. This gem provides full support for SPARQL 1.0 queries.

Also on blog here: http://greggkellogg.net/2011/09/29/rdf-rb-0-3-4-released

Gregg

[1] http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf
[2] http://rubygems.org/gems/rdf-xsd
[3] http://rubydoc.info/github/gkellogg/rdf/master/frames