Ivan Herman reports, “This has been in the works for a while, but it is done now: the latest (3.4.0 version) of the python RDFLib library has just been released, and it includes and RDFa 1.1, microdata, and turtle-in-HTML parser. In other words, the user can add structured data to an HTML file, and that will be parsed into RDF and added to an RDFLib Graph structure. This is a significant step, and thanks to Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, who helped me adding those parsers into the main distribution.”

He goes on, “I have written a blog last summer on some of the technical details of those parsers; although there has been updates since then, essentially following the minor changes that the RDFa Working has defined for RDFa, as well as changes/updates on the microdata->RDF algorithm, the general approach described in that blog remains valid, and it is not necessary to repeat it here. Read more

Ivan Herman of the W3C reports, “The W3C RDF Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation of Turtle – A Terse RDF Triple Language. This document defines a textual syntax for RDF called Turtle that allows an RDF graph to be completely written in a compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage patterns and datatypes. Turtle provides levels of compatibility with the existing N-Triples format as well as the triple pattern syntax of the SPARQL W3C Recommendation.” Read more

This week the United Nations revised its findings of three years ago that more than 1 billion people worldwide were going hungry. In its 2012 State of Food Insecurity in the World report, it revised its figures of undernourished people to closer to 870 million, about the same as it is today, according to reports.

The report actually presents new estimates of the number and proportion of undernourished people going back to 1990, finding that progress in reducing hunger has been more pronounced than previously believed – especially before 2007-2008. “The revised results imply that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing world by 2015 is within reach, if appropriate actions are taken to reverse the slowdown since 2007–08,” the report states.

The U.N. isn’t the only organization tracking the state of global hunger, though. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) demo is a tool adapted and developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to comprehensively measure and track global hunger – and standing behind it is LODSPeaKr (Linked Open Data Simple Publishing Kit).

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Kingsley Idehen has written a series of articles discussing “why Turtle is such an important syntax for crafting Web documents comprised of Linked Data based structured content. Basically, this markup language addresses the biggest challenges to Linked Data comprehension which include the following: (1) triple visibility, (2) triple comprehension. Once you get beyond triple visibility and comprehension, the next challenge for Linked Data is deployment. Historically, this effort has been mired by the following.” Read more

There has always been a misconception between the relationship of RDF and XML. The main difference: XML is a syntax while RDF is a data model.

RDF has several syntaxes (Turtle, N3, etc) and XML is one of those (known as RDF/XML). Actually, RDF/XML is the only W3C standard syntax for RDF (Currently, there is Last Call on Turtle, a new W3C standard syntax for RDF). Therefore, comparing XML and RDF is like comparing apples with oranges. What can be compared is their data models. The RDF data model is a graph while the XML data model is a tree.

Comparing RDF with XML

Joshua Tauberer has an excellent comparison between RDF and XML, which I recommend. Two advantages of RDF are highlighted: flexibility of the data model and use of URIs as global unique identifiers.

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Yesterday, we announced RDFa.info, a new site devoted to helping developers add RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) to HTML.

Building on that work, the team behind RDFa.info is announcing today the release of “PLAY,” a live RDFa editor and visualization tool. This release marks a significant step in providing tools for web developers that are easy to use, even for those unaccustomed to working with RDFa.

“Play” is an effort that serves several purposes. It is an authoring environment and markup debugger for RDFa that also serves as a teaching and education tool for Web Developers. As Alex Milowski, one of the core RDFa.info team, said, “It can be used for purposes of experimentation, documentation (e.g. crafting an example that produces certain triples), and testing. If you want to know what markup will produce what kind of properties (triples), this tool is going to be great for understanding how you should be structuring your own data.”

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In case you missed it, “The RDF Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Turtle (“Terse RDF Triple Language”). Turtle has been in use by the Semantic Web community for a long time; this document is the first formal step to, eventually, turn it into an official W3C Recommendation.”

The Turtle home page elaborates, “Turtle is already a reasonably settled serialization of RDF. Read more