blog  SciGraph 2017-2023.

Feb 2023

Springer Nature retired SciGraph earlier this month. I have been the data architect and then technical lead for this project, so this is post is just a reminder of the great things we did in it. Also, a little rant about the things that weren't that great...

blog  SciGraph publishes 1 billion facts as Linked Open Data.

Nov 2017

Last Thursday, we reached a major milestone for the SciGraph project: nearly 1 billion facts (= RDF statements) have been released as Linked Open Data, most of it under a CC-BY license!

blog  Leipzig Semantics 2016 conference.

Oct 2016

A few weeks ago, I attended the SEMANTiCS conference in Leipzig, so here's a short report about the event.

blog  Installing Stardog triplestore on mac os.

Nov 2014

Stardog is an enterprise-level triplestore developed by clarkparsia.com. It combines tools to store and query RDF data with more advanced features for inference and data analytics - in particular via the built-in Pellet Java reasoner. All of this is combined with a user experience that is arguably the best you can currently find in the market.

blog  Installing ClioPatria triplestore on mac os.

Oct 2014

ClioPatria is a "SWI-Prolog application that integrates SWI-Prolog's libraries for RDF and HTTP services into a ready-to-use (semantic) web server". It is actively developed by the folks at the VU University of Amsterdam and is freely available online.

blog  Installing GraphDB (aka OWLIM) triplestore on mac os.

Oct 2014

GraphDB (formerly called OWLIM) is an RDF triplestore which is used - among others - by large organizations like the BBC and the British Museum. I've recently installed the LITE release of this graph database on my Mac, so what follows is a simple write-up of the steps that worked for me.

blog  An interactive Turtle shell.

Oct 2014

Wouldn't it be nice to have an interactive environment where you could quickly hack together an RDF model and then show it to your clients or colleagues in a more accessible format - such as a diagram?

blog  Inspecting an ontology with RDFLib.

Jul 2011

RDFLib (homepage) is a solid and comprehensive RDF programming kit for Python. In a previous post, I discussed the Pythonic options currently available for doing semantic web programming. After more in-depth testing, I realized that RDFLib is the most accessible and complete of them all (in fact, many of the available libraries are based on RDFLib's APIs). So here we go: in this post I'm providing an overview of some of the things you can do with this library.

blog  A few useful Linked Data resources.

Mar 2011

I've done a bit of semantic web work in the last couple of weeks, which gave me a chance to better explore the current landscape around this topic. I'm working on some example applications myself, but in the meantime I thought I'd share some quite useful links I've encountered.

blog  Survey of Pythonic tools for RDF and Linked Data programming.

Feb 2011

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a data model and language that is quickly gaining momentum in the open-data and data-integration worlds. In this post, I'm reporting on a recent survey I conducted in the context of a Linked Data project I'm working on, SAILS. In SAILS, we're developing a prototype for RDF data manipulation and querying. Since the final application will be written in Python and Django, in what follows I've tried to gather information about all existing libraries and frameworks for RDF programming using Python.

blog  Installing RDFlib on osX.

May 2009

RDFlib is a Python library for working with RDF, a simple yet powerful language for representing information.

blog  Modeling Representations (take 2).

Mar 2007

I wrote something in the last weeks about the difficulties related to the modeling of representations and their contents. So today I just read this article by Stefano Mazzocchi, which basically hints at the same issue, but from an 'RDF perspective'. It's a very interesting article, so I just wanted to quote and comment a few passages