Ivan's Blog

I just came back from Gouangzhou (better known as “Canton” for Westerners), China. Quite amazing. A city of around 10 million people (so the locals said) and “only” the 5-6th city in the country (though, again, according to the locals it is the third most important city in the IT area after Beijing and Shanghai). The whole city feels as if it was built in the last 5 years (and it probably was, actually), booming, developing. It will be interesting to see when China will come out of the status of the “manufacture of the World”, and appear as a prime developer, innovator, scientific centre? (Although that might still take several years.) Nevertheless, it is clear that the bipolar World of the US and the European Union is soon over…

A lesson to be learned closer to home, by the way: I am a bit tired of the discussion around the referenda on the European Union in, say, France or the Netherlands. When will people realize that the only way for European peoples to stay around is via a united Europe? Otherwise, Europe is heading to become really the “museum of the World”, as one top man of Philips said not a long time ago…

Category: /Private/General; Posted at: 07:45 UTC; Permalink

I have ‘released’, so to say, an updated version of my SPARQL API for RDFLib. (As you can see, everything is in a CVS tree, so if you want to see previous versions, be my guest…

Lots of things have changed since the last release, including the API itself. This is because there are things I realized were wrong or simply awkward in the previous version. There are also some new features (eg, operators, datatypes). I have also added a Testing directory with a simple way of running tests; the directory includes a python version of almost all the relevant examples in the SPARQL draft. I must admit I have not made a systematic test yet with the official test cases; not having a SPARQL parser it is a pretty tedious process, because each query has to be mapped on the API manually. On the other hand, applications like the Talk management at W3C run with the renewed version for a while already, ie, the code is pretty stable, though may not abide 100% to the SPARQL draft yet…

The good thing is that there are several people who expressed their interest in taking over the development of the code and, eventually, merge it with the core RDFLib. This would be good for me but, I believe, for the Python/RDF community at large, too.

Category: /WorkRelated/SemanticWeb/RDFLib; Posted at: 14:42 UTC; Permalink