Links - Smalltalk and RDF/OWL
Updated: Sept 10 2007
There is a small but persistent Smalltalk/OWL project. From their project information page:
The Smalltalk OWL Project was launched 1 Jan 06, the overview of the effort is:
- Identify participants interested in achieving OWL capability in Smalltalk as opensource
- Identify existing Smalltalk design/code that can contribute to the solution
- Identify non-ST code and documentation that can be leveraged
- Develop an RDF/OWL reader/writer
- Develop an OWL reasoner
The project info page lists 14 supporters including heavy hitters of the Smalltalk world like Jim Robertson of Cincom ( VisualWorks ) and John O'Keefe of IBM ( VisualAge Smalltalk ). The lead facilitator is Agilense, which has a product EA WebModeler built in Smalltalk (VAST and Squeak). It implements "Adaptive Object Models", which have some degree of inference capability. They feel their product has a natural fit to the OWL world.
None of this is open source, by the way, though Agilense says "we also believe the core bits (which are open technology anyway...just not in ST) would be valuable for the ST community in general". It sounds as if they are saying that the open source code they port to Smalltalk will stay open source. We'll see ...
However, they identify SOUL as an interesting open source project that might support their objectives ( see Links - Smalltalk and SOUL ). They have an interesting PDF document about meta-programming that describes SOUL concepts and its version of the Prolog logic programming language.