ANN: DATAX 1.0beta (DATA Exchange in XML) Library

[David Megginson]

As announced Friday at the XML Developers' Conference in Montreal,
there is now a beta version of the DATAX library in Java available at
the following location:

  http://www.megginson.com/DATAX/

(The development of this library was funded by Muze,
http://www.muze.com/)

DATAX is a very simple set of interfaces for representing entities
(resources/objects) and their attributes (properties) and
relationships (references/links).  The library includes a default,
in-memory implementation, together with very efficient classes for
writing to and reading from RDF documents.

DATAX and RDF massively simplify the task of exchanging information
about things and their properties and relationships in XML; importing
an RDF document, for example, requires only one line of code:

  EntitySet entities = new RDFReader().read("mydata.xml");

You can then use the standard Java2 collections interface to iterate
through the entities (objects) read:

  Iterator it = entities.iterator();
  while (it.hasNext()) {
    Entity e = (Entity)it.next();
    System.out.println("The entity's identifier is " + e.getId());
    System.out.println("The entity's class is " + e.getClassId());
  }

It's equally simple to iterate through an entity's properties:

  Iterator it2 = e.iterator();
  while (it2.hasNext()) {
    Property p = (Property)it2.next();
    switch (p.getType()) {
      case Property.ATTRIBUTE:
        System.out.println("Literal: " + p.getName() + '=' + p.getValue());
        break;
      case Property.RELATIONSHIP:
        System.out.println("Link: " + p.getName() + '=' + p.getValue());
        break;
    }
  }

There are several query methods available as well.

The beta version includes source code but does not yet have an
explicitly open source license -- in particular, you have to agree
that any bug reports you submit can be merged back into the code base.
There will be a proper open-source license for the 1.0 final release
this fall.


Enjoy!


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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