Redleaf

Version: 0.0.1

Project Information

Redleaf is an alternative Ruby interface to the Redland RDF library by Dave Beckett. It was written to serve as the backend for an RDF-based metadata component for the ThingFish digital asset management server. I explored several other existing RDF libraries and found nothing that was both complete and followed familiar Ruby idioms.

Other RDF Libraries

Some other libraries I tried:

Redland – http://librdf.org/

The Ruby binding for the excellent collection of RDF libraries grouped under the name ‘Redland’ came the closest to what I wanted. The SWIG-based interface ultimately still showed through, and my initial trials exposed some design decisions that I didn’t feel like I could work around. I’m of course still using the same excellent C backend, but I’m custom-fitting it to Ruby in a more intimate way, and adding what I think is a more-natural way of using RDF from Ruby for practical tasks.

Semitar – http://semitar.projects.semwebcentral.org/

This was a project that Rich Kilmer described to me in great detail at the 2003 RubyConf, but it has languished since then due to Rich being perpetually swamped with some other exciting new project or other. While it doesn’t appear to be useable in its current state, large parts of the high-level interface are heavily influenced by the ideas expressed in it..

Rena — http://www.tom.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~sakai/hiki/?Rena

A pure-Ruby RDF library, originally written by Masahiro Sakai, Rena provides some of the same low-level functionality that is (more completely) addressed by Redland, but it hasn’t been maintained since 2004 and is a bit sparse and depends on a hyperset library which seems to have disappeared.

Reddy – http://github.com/tommorris/reddy/tree

A newish libxml-based library that seems to have started out as a fork of Rena. I didn’t find it complete enough to use for what I need it to do.

Others

There are a few other libraries for doing RDF stuff on Rubyforge and Github, but nothing that is as feature-complete or flexible as Redland, and nothing that presents a more-Rubyish interface. That’s not to say that they’re bad, of course, they just didn’t scratch my itch.

Project Resources

A bug tracker, a wiki with developer notes and ideas, and other such resources are available on the project’s Trac site.

You can check out the latest source via Mercurial at: http://repo.deveiate.org/Redleaf

Authors

• Michael Granger <ged@FaerieMUD.org>

License

Copyright © 2008, 2009 Michael Granger

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