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Practical RDF Shelley Powers
Publisher: O'Reilly Media

The book Practical RDF is now available. What if system A speaks RDF/XML only, and system B speaks only Turtle? But what if you're a lot more interested in Web 2.0, which is practical and real, than in the Semantic Web, about which opinions vary widely? The project was launched with a wholly practical approach to publishing data – about vending machines, catering halls, and other points of service – in RDF format by that school's web manager, Christopher Gutteridge. Personally I see nothing in the statement from Francis Maude that implies the mandating of RDF or Linked Data, only that “Where possible we will use recognised open standards including Linked Data standards”. Today I presented an internal seminar on RDF to the Bodleian Library developers, the first in a series of (hopefully) regular R&D meetings. There is a Web log, by the author, dedicated to the book. One issue I see is the migration from a one-standard-syntax world to a two-standard-syntax world and it's not without its practical problems. Since RDF resources are typically large and written in technical and long terms, the eye-parsing scenario is not practical, and certainly hampers the whole utility of SPARQL. And the availability of several SPARQL query engines means that this exploration can be practical rather than theoretical. Leigh Dodds presents the first of a multipart tutorial on SPARQL, a query language for RDF and the Semantic Web, which may also play a role in Web 2.0 apps and services. But I haven't really managed to use it in practical settings. RDF has long been used in commercial and public safety activites, and the approach employed here attempts to bring RDF development down to a practical, affordable level for the average radio experimenter. Although this book covers a small market, I believe that the combination of Common Lisp and the AllegroGraph RDF data store is a great combination for developing knowledge intensive software. I helped TimBL refine Delta: an ontology for the distribution of differences between RDF graphs a bit, and there's working code in cwm. The 2nd RDF F2F meeting took place on the 12-13 of October, using two locations: about half of the participants were in Cambridge, USA, hosted by MIT, while the other half were in London, UK, hosted by the BBC. At Talis we're doing the same – our RDF versioning protocol doesn't support bnodes either and we actually replace them with URIs in many places. "I chatted with my Practical RDF editor, Simon St. Laurent, and we decided to open up the technical book review to my weblog readers as well as the RDF Interest Group and the RSS Developers group. Regarding Kingsley's comment concerning EAV: I think we all get that EAV has historical precedence and is a more fundamental model than RDF, but for practical purposes why should adopters concern themselves with it?