RubyRDF

I remember checking out Dan Brickley‘s RubyRDF library awhile back and having trouble doing much with it. But of course that was a long time ago, so I thought I’d check back in to see if any progress had been made. After all, it’s that Dan Brickley, so you’ve at least got to see what’s there.

Unfortunately, the software was last updated in April 2003, and I suspect this means that it’s been abandoned. As noted in the documentation, RubyRDF is an experimental system and “not production-grade stuff.” Dan also notes later in the page, “I might not do any more work on this.” That’s fair, of course; it seems clear that Dan was pursuing this to scratch an itch, as is the case for a lot of open source projects on the web. But I decided to set this one aside again after a scan of the still-cluttered Wiki page. I guess I’ll check again this time next year, if none of the other RDF libraries for Ruby make it that far.

Posted July 15th, 2004 in Ruby, Semantic Web.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous:

    I am writing a wrapper for the Redland Appication Framework to process rdf.

    http://rubyforge.org/projects/rdf-redland/

    This is also linked from the Redland site

    http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/docs/ruby.html

    August 12th, 2004 at 2:57 am
  2. Anonymous:

    Yes, I have not been doing much on RubyRdf (as suspected and pre-warned!), and I think the time has now come to retire it. There were a few interesting pieces in there, but nothing that couldn’t be reworked elsewhere. There is a contributed pure-Ruby RDF parser (it used to use Expat, but I sorta nearly finished hacking it to use REXML as well).

    A while back I set up http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-ruby/ for collaboration on Ruby tools for RDF and SemWeb. Perhaps everyone hacking on RDF stuff in Ruby could join that list.

    BTW I’d be happy retiring the (very generic) name RubyRdf or offering it for use for anything that gets folded into the Ruby distro.

    August 17th, 2004 at 12:59 pm