Just about all the RDF triplestores I’ve been trying were designed from the ground up to store RDF triples. OpenLink Software’s Virtuoso is a database server that can also store (and, as part of its original specialty, serve as an efficient interface to databases of) relational data and XML, so some of my setup and usage steps required learning a few other aspects of it first. For example, the actual loading of RDF is done using Virtuoso’s WebDAV support, so I had to learn a…

In The cheap commodity eBook reader of the future, I wrote about how I look forward to a mass-market ebook reader created from an e-ink display and an inexpensive commodity processor. The folks at MOTO have taken a very cool step in this direction by hooking up a processor running Google’s Linux-based Android ( the mobile phone operating system that underlies T-Mobile’s G1 phone) to an e-ink display. MOTO’s announcement about it includes a short video demo.

My efforts to set up and try RDF triplestores have been a bit frustrating. I won’t go into reasons here, because several of the efforts are on hold for now, but my attempts to set up and use Sesame went so quickly and easily that I wanted to write it up right away.

Many have wondered about what the semantic web and publishing can offer each other. (By “publishing” here, I mean “making content available in one media or another, ideally to make money”.) After following a lot of writing and discussions in these two worlds—and they are surprisingly separate worlds—I have a few ideas and wanted to write them up where people could comment on them.

My old friend Dale Waldt (I remember, immediately after the announcement of the existence of XML at SGML 1996, going up to my then-coworker Dale and asking “So what do we think?”) recently posted an entry on the Gilbane XML blog titled Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult. A few days ago I posted a comment saying that the things that he saw as missing from semantic technologies are actually already there and working well, but my reply hasn’t shown up yet, so after a…

I recently realized that most of my experience with RDF has been with tools that load triples into memory and then work with them there, so I’ve decided to get to know the disk-based triplestores out there better: Jena, Joseki, Sesame, AllegroGraph, OpenLink, Mulgara… let me know if I’m missing anything here.

By Prateek on January 20, 2009 1:59 AM