Jeni's Musings

Updated to include some of Arto Bendicken’s recommendations.

This post is a response to Richard Pope’s Linked Data/RDF/SPARQL Documentation Challenge. In it, he asks for documentation of the following steps:

• Install an RDF store from a package management system on a computer running either Apple’s OSX or Ubuntu Desktop.
• Install a code library (again from a package management system) for talking to the RDF store in either PHP, Ruby or Python.
• Programatically load some real-world data into the RDF datastore using either PHP, Ruby or Python.
• Programatically retrieve data from the datastore with SPARQL using using either PHP, Ruby or Python.
• Convert retrieved data into an object or datatype that can be used by the chosen programming language (e.g. a Python dictionary).

I’ve been told so many time how RDF sucks for mainstream developers that it was the main point of my TPAC talk late last year. I think that this is a great motivating challenge for improving not only the documentation of how to use RDF stores and libraries but how to improve their generally installability and usability for developers as well.

Anyway, I thought I’d try to get as far as I could to see just how bad things really are. I am on Mac OS X, and I’m going to use Ruby (although I don’t really know it all that well, so please forgive my mistakes). I’ll breeze on through as if everything is hunky dory, but there are some caveats at the end.