Monday, March 31, 2008

Must-Learned Semantic Tools

W3C Semantic WebOne of my interests is in Semantic Web. The following tools are great if you already know .NET, C#, RSS and RDF, and want to do more with Semantic Web.

Semantic Web/RDF Library for C#/.NET


SemWeb is my Semantic Web/RDF library written in C# for Mono or Microsoft's .NET 1.1/2.0. The library can be used for reading and writing RDF (XML, N3), keeping RDF in persistent storage (memory, MySQL, etc.), querying persistent storage via simple graph matching and SPARQL, and making SPARQL queries to remote endpoints. Limited RDFS and general-purpose inferencing is also possible. SemWeb's API is straight-forward and flexible.

ASP.NET RSS Toolkit


RssDataSource control to consume feeds in ASP.NET applications:

  • Works with ASP.NET data bound controls

  • Implements schema to generate columns at design time

  • Supports auto-generation of columns at runtime (via ICustomTypeDescriptor implementation)


Caching of downloaded feeds both in-memory and on-disk (persisted across process restarts)
Generation of strongly typed classes for feeds (including strongly typed channel, items, image, handler) based on a feed URL (the toolkit recognizes RSS, Atom and RDF feeds) or a file containing a sample feed. Allows programmatically download (and creation) of feeds using strongly-typed classes.

LinqToRdf


LinqToRdf provides a full-featured LINQ query provider for .NET using both local triple stores with Graph Matching and SPARQL queries on remote stores. It also provides graphical design tools for visual studio 2008 that provide a UML style design surface for the production of both ontologies and .NET domain models.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Voiceless Future

This seems like the title of a Sci-fi movie, isn't it? Well, it's not. It could happen in our very near future. Check out the following video and this article. It is an amazing piece of technology.