Ablaze Development Blog

The Semantic Web allows users to interpret the meaning of data and business processes because of explicit semantics provided with the information, which develops a capability of knowledge discovery and re-usability.  Jena is a Java-based Semantic Web framework initially developed by HP Labs and now supported by the Open-Source Community.

The Jena framework provides Semantic Web technologies such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema, Web Ontology Language (OWL) and SPARQL.  RDF provides the ability to decompose knowledge into small, structured pieces of data, with rules about the meaning of those pieces of data.  OWL is the W3C’s recommended ontology language for representing information in the Semantic Web.  SPARQL is a SQL-like language for querying RDF models.  The Jena framework is designed to allow a range of pluggable rule-based inference engines, otherwise referred to as reasoners. Given an ontology and a RDF model, Jena’s inference engine can derive additional statements that the model doesn’t express explicitly.  This is a powerful capability which allows for the discovery of new relationships.

This month we are evaluating a open source Linux-based computer-on-module (COM) from Gumstix, Inc for use in future applications.  The Overo Air module comes with an OMAP 3503 ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz CPU,  W2CBW003 System-in-Package (SiP) that provides 802.11g and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, an on-board microSD card slot and is pre-flashed with Linux 2.6.29, Ångström distribution.

Gumstix Overo Air on Summit Board

Today, a new workstation arrived at the office from System76 with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) pre-installed.  Ubuntu is a community developed Debian-based Linux distribution.  Right out of the box I was able to plug it into our network and start configurating the system to be used as our new OpenEmbedded development environment.  OpenEmbedded (OE) is a cross-compiler framework for developing Linux-based embedded systems.