
                           Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit

Dave Beckett
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol

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 0.3, GRDDL for XHTML and XML. The serializing syntaxes are
   RDF/XML, N-Triples and RSS 1.0.

   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 handles the Atom 0.3 syndication format currently being
   standardised by the IETF Atom Publishing Format and Protocol working group.

  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.

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  2000-2005 Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research
   Technology, University of Bristol
