Finally got the Announcement of SWAD-Europe SKOS API for thesauri web service out describing the work Alistair, Nikki and I have been doing at the SKOS API site. There were always last minute changes that delayed us before this. The code is coming together too and we have some thesauri ready to use.

Last week, a proper native Ruby API for Redland was pretty much completed (with a few required changes to core Redland) by Dominic Sisneros which I was very pleased to see. It is available at the Rubyforge site project ruby-rdf along with extensive class documentation. It seems to have converted the C parts to more natural Ruby idioms in the manner I did for the other languages. It comes with a unit test suite and examples and is already up to version 0.5. It looks like it just remains to do a bit of portability testing, packaging, merging, maybe renaming the module namespace and decide how much of it to ship with Redland.

We should also prod the very quiet public-rdf-ruby list.

Thanks a lot, Dominic!

(There were also new redland C# API changes last week and other developments, more of which later)

Posted my XML Europe 2004 Trip Report for the SWAD-Europe Weblog. Nearby, there are my Amsterdam photos, mostly outside rather than in conference sessions but I caught Edd and Steve’s curiously large beer.

Document Action: ‘application/rdf+xml Media Type Registration’ to Informational RFC (IETF Announce), 2004-04-19. The MIME type RFC edited by Aaron Swartz has not been an assigned RFC number yet, but it is ready to go. The Mozilla folks have been tracking this in bug 61839 for some time and are now considering how to support it. Next stop, Apache httpd :)

The Debian Release Manager Anthony Towns recently summarised the position after a long thread and later updated the Release Critical Issues for Sarge document. The kernel maintainer responded with a message Purge of firmware to recommence Mostly the intention long-term seems to be to rip out the dubious binary firmwares in the source in hexdump.c format and turn them into loaded at runtime forms using the new firmware loading APIs, passing the patches “upstream” to the Linux Kernel maintainers.