Having to extend or develop a web application in PHP with support for Semantic Web technologies, one wonders what are currently the main
frameworks which allow to easily manage structured data in RDF. For PHP, the main framework currently available are:

• ARC2: easy to use, it provides an RDF storage with support for the SPARQL query language, various RDF parsers for numerous formats (RDF/XML, Turtle, RSS, microformats, eRDF, RDFa, etc), serializers supporting numerous formats (N-Triples, RDF/JSON, RDF/XML, Turtle), a templating system and many other stuff. ARC2 is easily extendible developing dedicated plugins.
  
  
• RAP: it provides an RDF storage with support for the SPARQL and RDQL query languages, an inference engine supporting RDF-Schema reasoning and some OWL entailments, an integrated parsers end serializer supporting numerous format (RDF/XML, N3, N-TRIPLE, TriX, etc.), an integrated system to draw RDF graph and a GUI to manage the RDF back-end

What is the best Semantic Web framework for PHP language? It depends from your needs. Anyway, at the moment, it seems that the development of ARC2 is more active than RAP. ARC2 seems also more stable than RAP.

Tomorrow morning, very early, me and some collegues of mine are going to leave for Tenerife, to attend at the 5th edition of the “European Semantic Web Conference” (ESWC), in which we will also have to present two of our scientific papers. The ESWC is one of the most important european event about the Semantic Web, during which the last research results and applications will be presented.

The ESWC conference will be certainly a very important event for my research activities and for my current work. But…this time, I’m not very happy to leave…

After several months of hard works, we have released a first alpha version release of DBin 2.0. Other then including numerous bug-fixes, the new Dbin version not use any more the P2P system. DBin 2.0 is based on a graph-publishing model mechanism. To try the new DBin version, you can freely download it from the official web site.

As usual, the workshop “Semantic Web Applications And Perspectives (SWAP 2007)” was a very interesting event, a unique opportunity which brought together researchers and practitioners in the challenging area of Semantic Web technologies.

There were a lot of interesting presentations. In particular, the presentations/tutorials from Chris Welty and Giovanni Tummarello were very interesting: Chris Welty talked about Ontologies and methodologies to design and develop them, while Giovanni Tummarello shown the Semantic Web in action.

This year the 4th workshop “Semantic Web Applications And Perspectives” (SWAP 2007) will take place in Bari (Italy), from 18th to 20th December, 2007, at the IT Department of the Università degli Studi di Bari.

The workshop will provide a unique opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners in the challenging area of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, SWAP 2007 aims at giving an overview of work going on in the Italian (and not only) Semantic Web community.

The official program of the workshop is not published yet. Anyway, briefly, the first day (18th December) will be dedicated to tutorials, while the second and the third day will be dedicated to the presentation of the accepted works/papers.

The invited talks are:

• Chris Welty: research scientist at ‘IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York;
• Giovanni Tummarello: researcher at Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway (Ireland).

An update (4th December): The offical program of the workshop has been published. You can see it following this link.

After an hard work, today DBin 0.58 have been released. This release includes a lot of bugs-fix, a little improvement to the P2P system and some little but interesting new fuatures. DBin 0.58 is available for Windows systems (official version) and for Unix/Linux and Mac system (beta version).

This year the third Italian Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives (SWAP) will be held in beautiful Pisa (Pisa, 18-20 December, 2006). Don’t miss a chance for an exciting meeting held in a speacial time and place.