RDF

A lot of water under the bridge has gone by since the first release of Meandre 1.4.X series. In January I went back to the drawing board and start sketching what was going to be 1.5.X series. The slide deck embedded above is a extended list of the thoughts during the process. As usual, I started collecting feedback from people using 1.4.X in production, things that worked, things that needed improvement, things that were just plain over complicated. The hot recurrent topics that people using 1.4.X could be mainly summarized as: ...

A while ago I wrote some thoughts about how to map RDF to and from FluidDB. There I explored how you could map RDF onto FluidDB, and how to get it back. That got me thinking about how to get a simple endpoint you could query for RDF. Imagine that you could pull FluidDB data in RDF, then I could just get all the flexibility of SPARQL for free. With this idea in my mind I just went and grabbed Meandre, the JFLuidDB library started by Ross Jones, and build a few components. The main goal was to be able to get an object, list of the tags, and express the result in RDF. FluidDB helps the mapping since objects are uniquely identified by URIs. For instance, the unique object 5ff74371-455b-4299-83f9-ba13ae898ad1 (FluidDB relies on UUID version four with the form xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx) is uniquely identified by http://sandbox.fluidinfo.com/objects/5ff74371-455b-4299-83f9-ba13ae898ad1 (or a url of the form http://sandbox.fluidinfo.com/objects/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx), in case you are using the sandbox or http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/objects/5ff74371-455b-4299-83f9-ba13ae898ad1 if you are using the main instance. Same story for tags. The tag fluiddb/about can be uniquely identified by the URI http://sandbox.fluidinfo.com/tags/fluiddb/about, or http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/tags/fluiddb/about. ...

Meandre (NCSA pushed data-intensive computing infrastructure) relies on RDF to describe components, flows, locations and repositories. RDF has become the central piece that makes possible Meandre’s flexibility and reusability. However, one piece still remains largely sketchy and still has no clear optimal solution: How can we facilitate to anybody sharing, publishing and annotating flows, components, locations and repositories? More importantly, how can that be done in the cloud in an open-ended fashion and allow anybody to annotate and comment on each of the afore mentioned pieces? ...

Have you ever wondered who does your intranet link to? I was sitting the other day in a meeting (yes, I know, breaking news) and I was wondering what would be a fast way to be able to answer the question. The basic sketch I did in my mind was simple: Set up a web crawler to the domain I want to analyze Run the crawling job Get the links collected on the web map Process the links to only keep the site they refer to Remove duplicates Visualize the graph Simple isn’t it? So, what do I need to get it to work? Basically three pieces of software (a web crawler, a graph manipulation library, and a visualization package) and some glue. Going over the things I been playing for the last year I draw three candidates: Nutch, RDFlib, and prefuse. Oh, the glue will be just two Python scripts. ...

Finally we have finished setting up the website for Meandre a semantic-driven data-intensive flow engine. Meandre provides basic infrastructure for data-intensive computation. It provides, among others, tools for creating components and flows, a high-level language to describe flows, and multicore and distributed execution environment based on a service-oriented paradigm. We are currently working on getting gear up for a first alpha release. You can visit the Meandre site here. I will be posting in the Meandre blog about our current steps toward getting the release out of the door. The Meandre infrastructure is being build to support the SEASR project ...