Introduction: Dave Beckett, University of Bristol

I'm Dave Beckett, senior technical researcher at the Institute for
Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol
in the UK.  I've previously co-/edited two W3C Recommendations:
RDF/XML and RDF Test Cases for the RDF Core WG.  My area is
development-led research in web metadata and searching for which I've
been working with since the mid 1990s such as with Dublin Core.

The project I'm working on presently is Semantic Web Advanced
Development Europe (SWADE, SWAD-E or SWAD-Europe)[1] funded by the EU
IST programme.  I have been mostly working on storage and scaling
issues and organised a workshop on storage and retrieval [2].  There
has been significant other query work by the SWADE project that we
also hope to bring in to this work such as query test and use cases
and several reports (see [1]).

SWADE has also funded me to continue development of my RDF free
software, currently 2 libraries (soon 3), all written in C:

Redland[3] - RDF library providing the graph API (storage,
             manipulation, parsing, serializing) with interfaces in
             Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, Tcl, C#.  Uses Raptor.

Raptor[4]  - RDF syntax library (parsing, soon serializing) handling
             RDF/XML, N-Triples, RSS tag soup and Turtle[5]

Rasqal[6]  - RDF query library handling parsing syntaxes (RDQL now),
             constructing an abstract query via API calls,
             executing the query and returning the result.
             Uses Raptor. [not released]

It is the latter that is likely most relevant to this working group
and what I am currently working on for SWADE.  I am hoping there is
an intersection with this work and the potential technology intended
developed by this group.

In terms of application areas, I am most interested in how this
technology can be applied to digital library and education sectors
for aiding learning and research.  Especially interested in how to
build useful services on the web that deliver semantic web style
content such as RDF and OWL.  Some use cases to follow separately.

Dave


[1] SWADE
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/
[2] SWADE Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and Retrieval
  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/dev_workshop_report_4/
[3] Redland RDF Application Framework
  http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/
[4] Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit
  http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/raptor/
[5] Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language
  http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2004/01/turtle/
[6] Rasqal RDF Query Library
  http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rasqal/

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2004 10:13:47 UTC