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.