DATAX 1.0beta (DATA Exchange in XML) Library

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Date:     Mon, 23 Aug 1999 14:05:15 -0400 (EDT)
From:     David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
To:       XMLDev list <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Subject:  ANN: DATAX 1.0beta (DATA Exchange in XML) Library

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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

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David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

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