It is our pleasure to announce the 1.0 release of ActiveRDF, available from http://www.activerdf.org/ or the RubyGems repository.
ActiveRDF is a library for accessing RDF data from Ruby programs. ActiveRDF gives you a domain specific language for your RDF model and provides object-oriented access to your RDF resources, classes, properties, etc. ActiveRDF conforms to the RDFS specification (multiple inheritance, multiple class membership, etc.)
ActiveRDF can be used as data layer in Ruby-on-Rails, similar to ActiveRecord. ActiveRDF with Ruby-on-Rails puts the semantic web on rails, and allows you to create semantic web applications rapidly.
With ActiveRDF you can access various sources of RDF data. We support SPARQL endpoints, Redland and RDFLite; (native) adapters for Jena, Sesame2 and YARS are in development.
ActiveRDF is supported and endorsed by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), and is used in several (web and non-web) applications. ActiveRDF is open source, released under LGPL license.
See http://sw.deri.org/wiki/ActiveRDF/gettingstarted/ for a getting-started guide. The guide shows you how to (1) install ActiveRDF, (2) read/write data, and (3) build a simple Rails application.
Changes from the previous releases:
ActiveRDF: - everything packaged as gems for easy installation - complete code rewrite: code is smaller, faster, and easier to understand - countless bugs fixed due to feedback and unit testing - access data with or without RDF Schema information - RDF namespaces are used as Ruby namespaces to avoid name clashes - objects behave correctly according to RDFS semantics - works happily with Rails, lives happily next to activerecord, - new nice query API to write queries programmatically
Adapters: - SPARQL adapter supports JSON and XML results - the Redland adapter uses latest Redland features such as better synching to disk and stability improvements - a brand new rdflite adapter, based on sqlite3 and ferret (if installed) for full text search. Rdflite is optimised for typical activerdf query patterns, leading to significant speed improvements when used with small data sets (up to 100K of triples)
Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren
