The Web Semantic

While working on jenabean I began to wonder if dynamic languages had features that would make editing ontology instance data easier.  The traditional method for bindind a schemas to objects normally involves creating some kind of binding descriptor file in XML.  The tedium of that process is well known and so painfull that it may not even continue to be a viable pattern.  What I discovered is that it’s rather easy to manipulate RDF files from Ruby (JRuby to be exact) using Jena.  The technique I decided upon was to dynamically create classes that map to RDF types in the ontology.  This is a type of “metaprogramming” that is familiar to rails developers, and to be fair, I spent a few hours reading ActiveRecord code to glean some ideas on how this type of binding works.  So let’s get started.  Here’s what you’ll need to follow along in a hands on manner: » Read the rest of this entry «