I just presented a talk Bootstrapping the Semantic Web with Redland at XTech describing Redland and how it came about, components etc. There’s a paper also which goes into this in more detail but the cute bit is at the last minute I came up with a demonstration, using the slides themselves as the RDF graph. This involves using GRDDL to create an RDF model behind the slides describing the content, and then performing an RDF query over that. Raptor turns the html into RDF for Rasqal, returning the variable binding results. In short:

$ roqet http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/people/cmdjb/talks/xtech2005/slides.rq
roqet: Querying URI http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/people/cmdjb/talks/xtech2005/slides.rq
roqet: Query has a variable bindings result
result: [slide=blank genid2, title=string("Bootstrapping the Semantic Web\nwith Redland")]
result: [slide=blank genid3, title=string("Overview")]
result: [slide=blank genid4, title=string("What Is Redland?")]
…

It requires the latest released rasqal 0.9.9 as I’m using the latest SPARQL syntax.

Technorati tags: sparql, xtech

I’ve had a busy few weeks travelling (I do most of my year’s travel in a 5 week period) first with SPARQLing days in Italy working on SPARQL, WWW2005 in Tokyo talking about Redland, SPARQL and a bit of microformats panel fun. Next is the exciting finale, XTech in Amsterdam Tuesday-Friday. I’m talking about Bootstrapping the Semantic Web with Redland. Which could also have a … with SPARQL suffix as that’s what I’ve been concentrating on most recently, in between and during travels. Plus some session chairing and meeting old and new friends.

Last Thursday night, I managed to ship the latest bits and pieces of software before rushing off for a non-working weekend away: Raptor 1.4.6 (GRDDL, RSS enclosures) and Rasqal 0.9.9 (SPARQL query syntax, xml format, engine).

I confidently predict XTech will rock. Amsterdam + geeks = fun

Technorati tags: xtech, www2005, sparql (must get this in the blog metadata!)

Just made a minor update to the SPARQL RDF Query Language Reference summary. A few errors fixed, a few additions.

If you want to learn about the SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) now is a great time to do it as there are some new materials available:

• Introduction to RDF Query with SPARQL Tutorial as given at WWW2005 by Steve, Eric, Andy and myself on Monday. All available for reuse.
• SPARQL RDF Query Language Reference, a 2-page summary document that I made of SPARQL including the concepts and syntax as well as Turtle RDF syntax.
• Search RDF data with SPARQL article by Philip McCarthy for IBM developerWorks using the ARQ Java query system, using Jena.

You can run these using multiple online demos (linked) or with several open source SPARQL implementations. Most of these are linked from the SparqlImplementations wiki page or from the Gargonza Experiment project which is a showcase for RDF and SPARQL.

The second day started with an interesting keynote from Eric Brewer of UC Berkeley: The Case for Technology for Developing Regions with emphasis on sustainable, practical and local ways to apply technology (ICT as usually called) in developing countries. Included lots of examples of self and local help to use appropriate technology and deal with issues of language, literacy and development. He described many opportunties for world-class PhD-level work ins areas such as low power for ICT devices that are not priorities for the developed world.

He refered to an upcoming article of the same name, The Case for Technology for Developing Regions being published in IEEE Computer in the June 2005 issue. Web searching also found me one of his classes on this topic: CS294-12: An Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Framework for Developing Regions

Technorati tag: www2005