SWAD-E Update

Here's my update in what I've been doing since the last technical
telcon / meeting.

WP 12.4

On the demonstrator side of things, I've been doing some background
work as well as some development.  I am still looking at appropriate
semantic web data sources to use and in particular RSS.  The stuff
on the web is mostly XML and very badly written.  The XML specs
are very vague, so this is to be expected, so what I needed was
something to scrape out the statements from this RSS tag soup.  I
wrote a new RSS parser for Raptor that does it, which can get
RDF triples out of any of the XML RSSes.  In doing this I found
some things I need to update internally to Raptor in order that
it can work over expat as well as libxml2 - that is ongoing.

I have been looking at a new triple store that has emerged, both in
terms of useful for this work as well as updating the triple store
survey and the RDBMS storage work (WP10.1, 10.2).  This is the 3Store
work at http://3store.sourceforge.net/ from the AKTORS project
(several partners, this work is done at the University Southampton).
It is a C library with a triple store interface built using an
existing OKBC toolkit directly talking to MySQL and providing an RDQL
query.  I've got it working, cooperated with the developers and made
some initial queries to it.

Redland and Raptor

I have also been doing some update to the Redland and Raptor APIs to
better deal with contexts and merging, and fix bugs that have been
reported since the last releases.  I have also done a split of the
Redland model interface/implementation that will soon allow adding
aggregate data stores so that graphs can be virtually merged across
multiple stores as well as actually merged via contexts inside a
single store.


Papers

The main work I've been doing most recently, was writing a paper for
submission to the International Semantic Web Conference 2003 (ISWC)
to be held in September 2003 in Florida.
  A retrospective on the development of the RDF/XML Revised Syntax
  http://ilrt.org/people/cmdjb/2003/05/iswc/
This covers the work I did with RDF Core in revising the syntax, the
approaches taken in the new syntax document.  It then describes the
existing problems that remain with syntaxes for RDF and outlines
various ways to address them including sketches of approaches for
future syntax work.  I can see there is another paper here in
expanding on the latter half, not from the retrospective point of
view.

Last week I gave a presentation XML Europe on general status of the
semantic web activity including the SWAD work in US and here.  I
showed our postcard for what was probably the first time - I think
it was Thursday's version.

  "Semantic Web Update - W3C RDF, OWL Standards,Development and Applications"
  http://ilrt.org/people/cmdjb/talks/xmleurope2003/

Plus a little RDF Core work - mostly telcons though.

Dave

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2003 06:18:33 UTC