ANN: RAP - RDF API for PHP V0.9 released - including RDFS inference support and a Jena-like resouce-centric API

Hi all,

we have released RAP - RDF API for PHP V0.9 today.

Version 0.9 is a major release and includes the following new features:

+ A resource-centric API similar to the Jena Model API
+ A ontology-centric API similar to the Jena Ontology API.
+ Inference support for RDF-S and some OWL constructs
+ A database administration tool for database-backed RDF models

The new ResModel API allows developers to manipulate an RDF graph as a set
of resources having properties. The ResModel API is very similar to the Jena
Model API enabling developers, which are used to Jena, to easily write RAP
code.

RAP included two RDF-S reasoning engines: InfModelF, which uses a forward
chaining inference algorithm and InfModelB, which uses a backward chaining
inference algorithm. Up to our knowledge, they are the only reasoning
engines implemented in PHP. The performance of InfModel can't compete with
the performance of reasoning engines implemented in Java or C, because PHP
still isn't a very fast language. But for medium sized models InfModel works
fine.

An overview about the new API structure is given in:

Introduction to RAP:
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/tutorial/introductionToRAP.htm

More information about RAP is found at:
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/ and
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/tests.html

Lots of thanks to
+ Daniel Westphal for the ResModel and OntModel APIs and the inference
support.
+ Gunnar AA. Grimnes for the database admin tool.
+ Tobias Gauss for lots of new test cases.
+ Many users for multiple bug reports and fixes.

Cheers,

Chris Bizer

Received on Friday, 22 October 2004 15:14:55 UTC