Aduna AutoFocus and Metadata Server

Aduna, the company I work for, have just announced the release of AutoFocus 2004.2. From the site:

"Aduna AutoFocus helps you to search and find information on your PC, network disks, mail boxes, websites and Aduna Metadata Server sources. It scans all places where you expect valuable information and provides powerful means for retrieving that information."

The great thing about this tool (from a SW developer's point of view) is that it is based on Semantic Web technology: internally it uses Sesame for storage and querying of document metadata in RDF. The RDF is not directly exposed through the tool's user interface but the normal Sesame APIs could be used to access it from another client application. The mentioned Metadata Server is also based on Sesame. Another thing that many people will find attractive is that AutoFocus is free for private use :-)

Yet Another FOAF browser

For the purpose of demonstrating Sesame at the last ISWC I wrote a small JSP-based FOAF browser. It is not very fancy and there are tons of niftier foaf browsers out there, but the point of this excercise was to show how easy it was to develop something like this on top of Sesame: the browser was created in about 1.5 day. I haven't put the code online yet but if you're interested drop me a line and I'll send it.

Sesame 1.1 released

Sesame 1.1 is the most thoroughly tested release in the history of Sesame. It has seen two release candidates which have been downloaded over 800 times in total. Lots of issues have been fixed as a result. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this release!

Highlights of this release are:

• The Graph API, an extension of Sesame's access APIs, allows fine-grained manipulation of RDF models directly from Java.
• The Native Disk Store is a new storage backend that works directly on the file system, without need for a DBMS. It uses B-Tree indexing on binary files for fast, efficient and scalable storage.
• SeRQL revision 1.1 is a syntax revision that makes SeRQL queries even easier to read and write, and makes embedding in XML easier.
• Blank node handling has dramatically improved compared to 1.0.x.
• Lots of issues related to full Unicode support have been fixed.
• RDF Schema inferencing has been updated to be fully compliant with the W3C RDF Semantics Recommendation.
• Support for MS SQL Server as storage backend RDBMS. Thanks to Adam Skutt for providing fixes and suggestions for this.
• The Rio parser now supports the Turtle serialization format.
• Partial OWL reasoning support through Sesame's custom inferencer.
• Fully updated and extended User Documentation, including code examples for use of the Sesame APIs and a new Troubleshooting and FAQ chapter.

A complete list of changes can be found in the Changelog. Download pointers can be found in the download section.

Verba volant, scripta manet

I thought I'd join the fad and create my own blog. Yay, I've got one! I haven't quite figured out for myself what the purpose of the blog will be, other than writing what I feel about and at least having the illusion that some other people will read it and be interested. We'll see.