Dave Beckett - Journalblog
RDF and free software hacking

I am happy to announce a new version of my Raptor library for dealing with syntaxes for RDF. I still call it a parser toolkit, otherwise the PT in raptor wouldn’t be so correct but it’s really more of an RDF syntax, URI and web library. It deals with low-level web detail you don’t [...]

I just announced the release of the Turtle version 2006-01-02 RDF syntax which I designed based on adding on the simple N-Triples format, and taking items from Notation 3 (N3). There have been happily, many people using this over the years and a lot of pending updates. This release though was primarily because of SPARQL which uses a Turtle/N3-style [...]

Dilbert does Web Standards (click through for the cartoon, I’m not inlining it). Sadly I’m somewhat in Dilbert’s predicament :(

So what have I been doing for the last few months? This: rsync -avz –delete bristol.uk:/home/ california.us:/home/

Alternatively, going from:

to:

In more detail: getting a new apartment, going to meetings, going to Atlanta for XML2005 and New York for WISE2005, talking about SPARQL a lot, going to more meetings, building new computers, reading lots of twiki pages, failing to ship another Raptor (nearly there), talking about [...]

At the end of September I’ll be leaving the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol in the UK after more than five years of productive and interesting work with RDF and the Semantic Web including developing the Redland RDF libraries. It’s been a great place to work at with super people who have [...]

The cairo team is very pleased to announce cairo 1.0 released. So what is it? Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window System, win32, and image buffers. Experimental backends include OpenGL (through glitz), Quartz, XCB, PostScript and PDF file output.

I had a little to do with some [...]

Just watched Berners-Lee on the read/write web an interview of Tim Berners-Lee by Mark Lawson on the BBC Newsnight programme tonight. The BBC news site provides a partial transcript written as a news story. It seems this is part of a longer 30-minute interview that’ll be shown on the BBC4 TV channel later. The interview as edited [...]

I just made a bot for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC scratchpad (aka chump) that pulls the mentioned URIs, titles, keywords and comments out of the existing feed and posts them to a dedicated swigbot account on del.icio.us. The user nicks on IRC turn into either taggedby:nick or commentedby:nick and the chump keywords into del.icio.us tags. It only grabs items that have been [...]

I’ve updated my SPARQL RDF Query Language Reference to match the recently released SPARQL Query Language 21 July 2005 Working Draft. While doing that I have also got a list of some of the more visible (syntax) changes, which is are as follows (this may not be a complete list):

Blank nodes are allowed in any part of a triple [...]

The RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) has just published SPARQL Query Language for RDF Last Call Working Draft 21 July 2005 edited by Eric Prud’hommeaux, W3C and Andy Seaborne, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol.

Yes, last call. That is, the working group thinks it is done. There are many changes and improvements ranging from text and formalism polishing, some syntax parts and some [...]