Re: Improved RDF support in new Protege-2000 release

Klaus Malorny wrote:
> 
> please excuse if this is dumb question, but I am new to the RDF topic. What
> kind is the piece of software you called "Sergey's parser"? Is this public
> domain/open source software? Where can I find it? I once planned to write my
> own XML -> RDF model -> XML software, but tracking the additionally generated
> statements (reified statements, bags, aboutEach, aboutEachPrefix), so that no
> extra/unneccessary statements are produced for them in the output phase, was a
> hurdle too high for my first attempt.
> 

Klaus,

What we at SMI have taken to calling "Sergey's parser" is
actually two things:

	1. The SiRPAC RDF Parser
	2. An RDF API based on the idea of issuing "find" commands to 
		models that allows you to search for RDF triples.

Both are currently under the care and supervision of Sergey Melnik
(melnik@db.stanford.edu). Hence our nomenclature.

In general, a good resource for finding about RDF projects etcetera
is Stefan Decker's "Semantic Web Portal" 

	http://www.semanticweb.org

You can find pointers to both the SiRPAC and the RDF API there. 

We decided to incorporate these into Protege because (1) The
API is pretty okay (a little low-level but that's better than
the opposite problem) and (2) We wanted to use a standard API
to help us track the (we hope) evolving spec. We found it 
quite useful. 

One important note:  the RDF API distributed on Sergey's web site
is currently fairly slow on large knowledge bases. As part of
our RDF support, we (the Protege group), hacked into Sergey's code 
and removed some of the slow bits. We've given those changes 
back to Sergey and, as soon as he gets the time to fold them in, 
his version will be much faster. 

All of which amounts to: if you like the API but think the code is 
too slow, be patient. The problem, and a solution, are both known. 


William Grosso

Received on Monday, 17 July 2000 13:03:35 UTC