[ckan-dev] RDF Serialization?

Mon Jun 20 15:14:01 UTC 2011

Hi Kendra,

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Kendra K. Levine
<kendra.k.levine at gmail.com> wrote:
> One question that I still have is about RDF serialization. I've heard
> conflicting stories about it in CKAN, and I'm not sure if there's any
> consensus on the issue. I just sort of assumed we would be using RDF, but I
> would like get a better sense from the community.

there are at least 3 different ways to do it, which I'd call the "old
will waites way" (old www, it has to be given a name), the "new will
waites way" and what we did for publicdata.eu:

* old www: Python batch job generates plain files to be stored on
disk, these used to be served from semantic.ckan.net.
* new www: Go daemon traverses several catalogues, keeps them in
memory as an RDF graph and serves them out to the RDF hungry-masses.
* pdeu: We're mounting an RDF representation of packages at
/rdf/package/NAME and writing to a 4store whenever things change in
the RDBMS. The store SPARQL is then reverse-proxied to /rdf/sparql.

Each of these generates slightly different RDF representations of the
same packages, which in many cases, now exists for all versions. As
for how they differ, that would be an interesting topic to research
under the influence of some anti-depressant medication.

Hope this helps,

 - Friedrich