Stephen Evanchik's blog

Wow, it has been a long long time since I updated this blog. Eli complained a couple days ago about it not being kept up to date and I realized that it is almost a year since my last post. A lot has changed so read on!

Late last week I released ODO 0.20 which has some important updates:

• Jena Database compatibility layer

It is now possible to connect to and read/write databases created with HP Lab’s Jena . The code is still experimental but provides a good starting point for feedback. There are test cases in this release so regression testing and bug demonstration should be easy.

• RDFS code generator.

Ontologies and more specifically the RDFS code generator have been updated and bug tested. The version in the first release was a port of older code that didn’t translate perfectly in to the new ODO framework. I am happy to report that the code is now used to host the ODO-Jena compatibility layer and there are now test cases for it as well.

I have been working at IBM for the past couple years on a project called the IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform . The project is a collection of software components that provide support for semantics through the entire application-middleware stack.

We released the source code for the entire project in November under the Eclipse Public License .

My part of the project originates from my work on the LSID project. I had been working with a lot of RDF metadata while maintaining the Perl LSID development stack and realized that (back in early 2004) that a clean, useful and relatively bug free RDF framework didn’t exist. It turns out that a number of people shared my concerns and were independently creating their own ad hoc Perl libaries for RDF processing.

We published Part 9: Understanding the database layer in our on going series about Drupal on developerWorks several weeks ago. The article describes how the Drupal database abstraction layer works using the pager system and our announcement module as discussion points.

We conclude the article with a “gift” to the Drupal community: support for IBM DB2 Express-C. Hopefully someone will take our work and finish it for later versions of Drupal .

The next two articles in our developerWorks series on Drupal were published. Check out Part 7: Structuring content for theming using XHTML to learn about how we developed a consistent, clean content structure with proper semantics that we use in Part 8: Styling content for theming using CSS .

Discuss them on our developerWorks forum or drupal.org !