2008-05-10
Name Conflict
After blogging about Piglet and mentioning my Python "wrapper" for Piglet, dubbed "pyglet", many people noted that the name is already taken. Thank you everyone for letting me know.
I hate picking names...
For now, I am renaming the Python wrapper "piglet" as well. We'll see how confusing that will be.
Some people also wrote to me about other RDF triple stores and toolkits written in Python. I should note that I am not implementing yet-another-Python-RDF-toolkit. Instead, I wrote a Python interface to the Piglet library (libpiglet) to allow us to start using it with our existing Python software. I think of it as an interim solution.
Posted by ora at 09:57 | Comments (1)
2008-05-02
Piglet
For some time now I have been working on "Piglet", a small RDF triple store written in C++, incorporating all those things we learned from building Wilbur first in Common Lisp and subsequently in Python. So far, I have a version ready that replicates functionality of the lowest layers of Wilbur. Piglet makes heavy use of SQLite3.
Piglet can be used as the back end for programs built on Wilbur. It merely replaces the parser (Piglet makes use of Raptor for this purpose) and the layers under the RDF++ reasoner and WilburQL path query engine. Eventually Piglet will have its own implementation of the path query language.
Right now, I am working on adapting Piglet for use as a Python extension module (working title: "Pyglet").
Posted by ora at 09:47 | Comments (4)
2008-04-29
Switching to SBCL
After developing on OpenMCL (and also Allegro) for a long time, I recently decided to switch to SBCL. My development machine (MacBook Pro) is still running MacOS 10.4.xx, and I just got tired of having to deal with the "32-bit or 64-bit" question. So I built a version of SBCL with multithreading enabled. It seems to work nicely, and I can now run all those things I like (MySQL client libraries, SQLite3, and Portable Allegroserve -- this is the one that needs the threads) without the aforementioned problem.
I am starting to like SBCL. I use Slime with Emacs (I switched from ILisp), and debugging etc. works reasonably well. SBCL is very fussy about the "purity" of the language, though (and I thought I was a perfectionist when it comes to how to write CL code -- little did I know...).
Posted by ora at 14:27 | Comments (1)
2008-03-28
Internship
My current project (called "Virpi") focuses on using rich information and Semantic Web representations/technologies to support the generation of speech and dialogue -based user interfaces. The project merges our long-standing efforts in the Semantic Web area and in the area of speech and natural language processing.
We could hire at least one more intern for this summer. Send me an email (ora dot lassila at nokia dot com) if you are interested, know Semantic Web technologies, can write code, and could work in Cambridge (Massachusetts) this summer...
Posted by ora at 11:44 | Comments (0)