Get Semantic with DBPedia and ActiveRDF. I'm quite excited by the things that the Semantic web will make possible, and one very interesting project is DBpedia, which aims to extract structured data from Wikipedia, link it with other datasets and put everything in an RDF triple store that you can either download or query via a 'SPARQL endpoint' on the web.
I've been trying out using ActiveRDF to make DBpedia queries and showing the results in a Korundum KDE4 app. This week the DBpedia team have improved the dataset with better extraction algorithms and bug fixes, and it is starting to get seriously useful. ActiveRDF is similar to Rails ActiveRecord, but instead of retrieving relational database query datasets, and turning them into instances of ruby classes, it retrieves RDF from triple stores.
To use the app, you enter the name of a resource such as 'The Beatles', the resource is looked up in DBpedia and an abstract of the Wikipedia article, along with any references is retrieved. Pretty simple! Danbri's foaf stories. If you’re interested in collaborating on Ruby tools for RDF, please join the public-rdf-ruby@w3.org mailing list at W3C.
Just send a note to public-rdf-ruby-request@w3.org with a subject line of “subscribe”. Last weekend I had the fortune to run into Rich Kilmer at O’Reilly’s ‘Social graph Foo Camp‘ gathering. In addition to helping decorate my tent, Rich told me a bit more about the very impressive Semitar RDF and OWL work he’d done in Ruby, initially as part of the DAML programme. Matt Biddulph was also there, and we discussed again what it would take to include FOAF import into Dopplr. I’d be really happy to see that, both because of Matt’s long history of contributions to the Semantic Web scene, but also because Dopplr and FOAF share a common purpose. Now, the thing about engineering serendipity, is that it doesn’t work without good information flow. Dopplr, Tripit, Fire Eagle and other travel and location services may know where you and others are.
How hard can it be? The state of Ruby, RDF and Rails 3. Edit Posted by Eric Kidd on 12/20/2010 Recently, I was investigating the state of RDF in the Ruby world.
Here are some notes, in case anybody is curious. I have used only a few of these Ruby RDF libraries, so please feel free to add your own comments with corrections and other alternatives. There’s also some stuff about ActiveModel and ActiveRelation down at the end, for people who are interested in Rails 3. For a list of available Ruby RDF libraries, run: RDF.rb: A high-level, pure-Ruby RDF library RDF.rb appears to be the most complete of the Ruby RDF libraries. The short descriptions below are taken directly from gem.
Formats: N-Triples (included)rdf-json: RDF/JSON support for RDF.rb.rdf-n3: Notation-3 (n3-rdf) and Turtle reader/writer for RDF.rb.rdf-rdfa: RDFa reader for RDF.rb.rdf-rdfxml: RDF/XML reader/writer for RDF.rb.rdf-trix: TriX support for RDF.rb.rdf-xml: An RDF.rb plugin for XML files. Storage adapters: Related libraries: Storage adapters and libraries. ActiveRDF. Overview ActiveRDF is a library for accessing RDF data from Ruby programs.
It can be used as data layer in Ruby-on-Rails, similar to ActiveRecord (which provides an O/R mapping to relational databases). ActiveRDF in RoR allows you to create semantic web applications very rapidly. ActiveRDF gives you a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for your RDF model: you can address RDF resources, classes, properties, etc. programmatically, without queries. ActiveRDF can be used with various RDF stores, adapters to other stores can be written very easily.ActiveRDF uses convention over configuration, which means it works very nicely in 90% of the cases.ActiveRDF is open source, released under the LGPL license. The development of ActiveRDF was inspired and influenced by the work on model-driven web development of prof. Examples Query resources Documentation The wiki should be your starting point for documentation. Rails 3 + Mongoid + HAML + RSpec 2 template - Boldr.