Presentation round

[Gregory Williams]

On Feb 16, 2007, at 2:49 AM, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:

> Now we're 14 members on the Perl/RDF list, which is a good start, and
> supposedly a good number to start to get to know each other. So I
> figured we could do a little presentation round. Let me start:

Thanks for starting this up, Kjetil.

I'm Greg Williams, and I'm currently with the MINDSWAP group at the  
University of Maryland with Jim Hendler (soon to be at RPI). I'm  
interested primarily in media annotation and lower-level RDF frameworks.

In that area, I maintain the perl RDF::Query SPARQL engine[1] and  
(begrudgingly) work in Java with the PhotoStuff project[2].

I know some of us have talked before (mostly on irc) about wanting to  
inject some life back into the perl RDF scene, wanting to get past  
some of the issues we've had with things like RDF::Core. In that  
area, I've got some ideas and some code (more on that another time)  
for keeping pace with toolkits in other languages.

Finally, I'll note that I've had some code lying around for a while  
that I'd like to release dealing with syntax shortcuts for Redland  
(for now, I've called it RDFx::Redland::Namespace). It ties in with  
XML::Namespace and XML::CommonNS to provide a quick way to get  
RDF::Redland::Node objects. For example:

	use RDFx::Redland::Namespace qw(foaf);
	my $pred = $foaf->homepage;
	# instead of RDF::Redland::Node->new_from_uri('http://xmlns.com/foaf/ 
0.1/homepage');

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Want to see it released? Want  
to see it modified in any way (I'm thinking of similar shortcuts for  
blank nodes and literals...)?

Hoping to hear from the rest of you soon.

thanks,
.greg


[1] http://search.cpan.org/dist/RDF-Query/
[2] http://www.mindswap.org/2003/PhotoStuff/

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