“On Monday August 28, 2000 Brian McBride a researcher and HP employee at Bristol Labs in the UK announced ‘Jena – A Java API for RDF’ on the W3C RDF Interest Group mailing list. Having examined existing tools at the time and contemplated new ideas for a RDF API dedicated to the Java ecosystem Brian felt the community was ready for a standardised set of tools to develop Semantic Web applications. Last but not least to help encourage the adoption of RDF. An open source project dedicated to the emerging Semantic Web activity at the W3C, long before the project became a top level Apache project on April 18 in 2012, simply known as Jena.”

“Jena today is more than an approximation or just true to the word Java implementation of the RDF specifications. Over the years many new innovations were introduced that shaped the RDF tooling and Semantic Web landscape itself significantly. Among them are query languages for RDF, efficient storage support and a HTTP RDF server enabling RESTful SPARQL endpoints just to mention a few. It is no surprise that many of the concepts behind these contributions later found their way into W3C recommendations, the highest form of endorsement by the W3C. Other innovations entered the RDF world as independent contributions in the form of extensions to the core project such as GeoSPARQL, JenaBeans and many more. All enabled and inspired by the availability of an open core set of features found in the Jena API. At this lotico event we are going to celebrate and recall some of the Jena milestones and learn from community members and project contributors about past developments and the state of the art.”

Read more on the event website

Aaron Bradley

Aaron Bradley is Senior Structured Content Architect at Telus Digital, and chief cook and bottle washer at The Graph Lounge.

thegraphlounge.com