
   #DOAP

                           Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit

Dave Beckett

Overview

   Raptor is a free software / Open Source C library that provides a set
   of parsers and serializers that generate Resource Description
   Framework (RDF) triples by parsing syntaxes or serialize the triples
   into a syntax. The supported parsing syntaxes are RDF/XML, N-Triples,
   Turtle, RSS tag soup including Atom 1.0 and 0.3, GRDDL for XHTML and
   XML. The serializing syntaxes are RDF/XML (regular, and abbreviated),
   N-Triples, RSS 1.0, Atom 1.0 and Adobe XMP.

   Raptor was designed to work closely with the Redland RDF library (RDF
   Parser Toolkit for Redland) but is entirely separate. It is a portable
   library that works across many POSIX systems (Unix, GNU/Linux, BSDs,
   OSX, cygwin, win32). Raptor has no memory leaks and is fast.

   This is a mature and stable library. See the todo list for the current
   state information. A summary of the changes can be found in the NEWS
   file, detailed API changes in the release notes and file-by-file
   changes in the CVS ChangeLog.
     * Designed to integrate well with Redland
     * Parses content on the web if libcurl, libxml2 or BSD libfetch is
       available.
     * Supports all RDF terms including datatyped and XML literals
     * Optional features including parsers and serialisers can be
       selected at configure time.
     * C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl interfaces when used via
       Redland
     * No memory leaks
     * Fast
     * Standalone rapper RDF parser utility program

   Known bugs and issues are recorded in the to do list.

Parsers

  RDF/XML Parser

   A Parser for the standard RDF/XML syntax as revised by the W3C RDF
   Core working group.
     * Fully handles the RDF/XML syntax updates for XML Base, xml:lang,
       RDF datatyping and Collections.
     * Handles all RDF vocabularies such as FOAF, RSS 1.0, Dublin Core,
       OWL, DOAP
     * Handles rdf:resource / resource attributes
     * Uses expat and/or (GNOME) libxml XML parsers as available or
       required

  N-Triples Parser

   A parser for the N-Triples syntax as used by the W3C RDF Core working
   group for the RDF Test Cases.

  Turtle Parser

   A parser for the Turtle Terse RDF Triple Language syntax, designed as
   a useful subset of Notation 3.

  RSS "tag soup" parser

   A parser for the multiple XML RSS formats that use the elements such
   as channel, item, title, description in different ways. Attempts to
   turn the input into RSS 1.0 RDF triples. True RSS 1.0, as a full RDF
   vocabulary, is best parsed by the RDF/XML parser. It also generates
   triples for RSS enclosures.

   This parser also provides partial support for the Atom 1.0 syndication
   format standardised by the IETF Atom Publishing Format and Protocol
   working group and soon to be an IETF RFC.

  GRDDL parser

   A parser for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages
   (GRDDL) which allows reading XHTML and XML as RDF triples by using
   profiles in the document that declare XSLT transforms from the
   XHTML/XML content into RDF/XML which is the RDF content.

   The parser does not support all the GRDDL styles, for example
   dataview:namespaceTransformation, or perform recursive
   transformations.

Serializers

  RDF/XML Serializer

   A serializer to the standard RDF/XML syntax as revised by the W3C RDF
   Core working group. This writes a plain triple-based RDF/XML
   serialization with no optimisation or pretty-printing.

   A second serializer is provided using several of the RDF/XML
   abbreviations to provide a more compact readable format, at the cost
   of some pre-processing. This is suitable for small documents.

  N-Triples Serializer

   A serializer to the N-Triples syntax as used by the W3C RDF Core
   working group for the RDF Test Cases.

  RSS 1.0 Serializer

   A serializer to the RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 format.

  Atom 1.0 Serializer

   An alpha quality serializer to the Atom 1.0 format. A critical missing
   part is that it does not write the text content of the feed. Hence
   this is not ready for use.

  Adobe XMP Serializer

   An alpha quality serializer to the Adobe XMP profile of RDF/XML
   suitable for embedding inside an external document.

Documentation

   The public API is described in the libraptor.3 UNIX manual page. It is
   demonstrated in the rapper utility program which shows how to call the
   parser and write the triples in a serialization. When Raptor is used
   inside Redland, the Redland documentation explains how to call the
   parser and contains several example programs. There are also further
   examples in the example directory of the distribution.

   To install Raptor see the Installation document.

Sources

   The packaged sources are available from http://librdf.org/dist/source/
   (master site) and also from the SourceForge site. There are nightly
   snapshots of the development version which can also be browsed via
   CVSweb.

License

   This library is free software / open source software released under
   the LGPL (GPL) or Apache 2.0 licenses. See LICENSE.html for full
   details.

Mailing Lists

   The Redland mailing lists discusses the development and use of Raptor
   and Redland as well as future plans and announcement of releases.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Copyright (C) 2000-2005 Dave Beckett
   Copyright (C) 2000-2005 Institute for Learning and Research
   Technology, University of Bristol
