Today’s reading list:

• On the Quality of Metadata… by Stefano Mazzocchi. Read this, then read it again. The lesson I mainly got from this is, as expected, W3C XML schema does not modularise or compose, don’t use it to describe metadata on the web. Ever. There’s more in there too – engaging feedback on metadata so it can improve.
• A nice writeup on the launch of the GPL v3 process from Simon Phipps including the background on the changes in this first draft. I also found the gplv3 draft 1 HTML awful to read, but inside it there’s a nice plain text blob that I could wdiff against the GPL v2.1 to see what’s new. (via Tim Bray)

Yesterday I announced version 0.9.11 of my Rasqal RDF Query Library. It’s another “catching up” edition with changes going back to June 2005. It should be up-to-date with the SPARQL WD 2005-11-23 at least in terms of syntax. All the details are in the release notes and the query demo should be updated soon.

The Free Software Foundation (of which I’m a member) has just announced the start of the discussion on a draft 3rd edition of the GPL. This is the most important free software license today not just because it covers the GNU software but it includes Linux as well as many other major free software (GNOME, KDE, Mozila partially). This is sure to generate a huge discussion. Looks like so far the new parts are about Patents and DRM but I haven’t read it all through yet. I’d expect to see something about dynamic linking as it’s one grey area.

There is a fancy database backed comments version of the draft but it seems to be having server load problems (hello Slashdot or Digg if it’s not there yet) and looks like there’s some SQL injection possibilities in URLs that include SQL syntax.

• Fog in Sunnyvale
• A pile of email
• New Apple products such as the MacBook Pro
  (Steve Jobs is certainly a keynote presentation genius)
• A new episode of House
• Birthday cards, emails, IMs, IRC and real-life greetings, phone and Skype calls.

Sadly my employer didn’t buy any new companies today to celebrate, that was yesterday :)

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 want to care about when you are writing RDF applications. Raptor is primarily different from Redland in that Raptor provides the web and syntax functionality but only knows about how to read and write single RDF triples. Redland has RDF graphs, stores for them, proper developer APIs and higher level features like querying.

This is a major release for Raptor as it covers all the pending stuff that was ready to release before I rushed off to my new job at Yahoo! plus new things since then.

Summary of what’s new and important:

• The RSS Tag Soup parser now reads Atom 1.0 and rewrites old Atom 0.3 terms
• Added a guess parser that picks the parser to use based on protocol information such as HTTP Content-Type (Rasqal needs this for reading data in SPARQL)
• Created an enhanced Raptor API reference manual by means of gtk-doc. This is more detailed and prettier than the libraptor manual page which remains.
• The serializers to compile into the library can now be selected at configure-time just like the parsers. Mainly this means you can build an even more slimmed down library if you want.
• Parsers can now return the namespace prefix/URIs seen in parsing – long requested.
• The Turtle parser was updated to version 2006-01-02 (announcement)
• The RDF/XML serializers and the XML writer can write XML 1.0 or XML 1.1.
• Added an alpha-quality Atom 1.0 serializer.
• Added an Adobe XMP (RDF/XML profile) serializer.

The rest with full detail is in the 1.4.8 release notes

Also I’m switching to Subversion for version control now that this release is commited.