I’ve been involved in a few projects at work over the last couple of years that have made use of Semantic Web technologies (triple stores, RDF, OWL, SPARQL etc). For most of these I’ve made of ARC, a really great PHP library by Ben Nowack for interacting with RDF and triple stores. As great as ARC is, it does have a few drawbacks such as being limited to MySQL triple stores, some issues with OPTIONAL queries and it doesn’t entirely support the SPARQL specification.

For these reasons and for general flexibility, my current project wanted to be able to easily swap the underlying triple store from ARC to Jena as needed so I needed to investigate how to expose a Jena triple store as a SPARQL endpoint. After working this out, I now really really appreciate how easy ARC makes this.

I installed the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix release candidate on my new Dell Mini 10v and the wireless didn’t work out of the box. I think this is because there isn’t an open source driver and Ubuntu doesn’t ship with proprietary drivers installed. Now the 9.10 has been released this problem may have disappeared, but in case anyone else sees this, the way to solve it is to install the proprietary wireless driver (Broadcom STA) yourself.

The API for the indicator applet has changed in Karmic and a little internal IBM Python application that I’ve written stopped working. Only a couple of minor changes were needed but trying to track down exactly what these were was not as easy a task as I’d have liked.