New RDF::Query

March 20th, 2009 2:11 PM

Last week, I finally found some time to wrap up the state of RDF::Query, and get things ready for a release. It’s the first release in almost a year, and while the user facing API is mostly unchanged, lots of things have changed under the hood. There’s too much to detail here (just compiling the changelog took me a couple of days, and it was mostly a firehose approach without the effort of summarizing anything), but I’ll highlight a few things I’m excited about, (especially in the context of the current DAWG work to update SPARQL):

  • SPARQL syntax extensions:
    • Support for UNSAID keyword, allowing much simpler syntax for queries with negation.
    • Support for FeDeRate BINDINGS syntax, generalizing the ability to pre-bind certain variables.
  • The new (fairly rudimentary) cost model code will give significant speedup on some queries.
  • The use of proper query plan objects allows queries to be built programmatically (a feature requested by KjetilK).

The new version, 2.100, is available from CPAN, and ongoing development is available from github.