Bloody nervous

Agh, I've seldom been so nervous. And for what? A somewhat quaint bit of ceremony involving robes, solemn standing and sitting, and me being questioned for an hour by five professors, in front of a gathering of friends, family and co-workers... Gah.

Yes. I'm defending my PhD thesis, this monday. July 4. 15:45. Free (well, on my expense) drinks afterwards (they really should do that in advance you know, at least for the candidate...). You're invited.

Oh yeah, if you're interested, my thesis is available for download (zipped PDF, 9.8MB), deadwood copies available on request.

Sesame 1.2 released

Sesame 1.2 is now available. Its major new feature is SeRQL revision 1.2. Apart from that, it includes several performance improvements, bug fixes and new features.

For a full overview of updates see the Changelog.

RDF querying with SeRQL 1.2

We've just released Sesame 1.2 release candidate 1, yay! The most important new feature of this release is the inclusion of a query engine for SeRQL revision 1.2.

SeRQL 1.2 has a number of extensions, in the form of new operators and functions. It now features query nesting, existential quantification, and set algebraic operations, such as union, intersection and difference. Additionally it now has a set membership operator, can do case sensitive and case insensitive string matching, has functions for retrieving the namespace or the localname of any URI, can check if a variable is bound to a URI, a blank node or a literal, has ANY and ALL keywords for modifying boolean comparison behavior, and can add boolean constraints inside optional path expressions using a nested WHERE clause.

So I'm well chuffed. SeRQL is growing up to be an expressive little language. All the new features are described in the SeRQL manual, and you can experiment with them on Sesame's demo server. Happy circling...