Soprano is out of maintenance

[ctieben]

Hi there,

the soprano packages is missing in Debian 10 and so also in Ubuntu >= 19.10.

You could use the sempr-tk/soprano_qt5 fork instead.

But for future releases we should find an alternative for soprano.

One possible solution would be drobilla/serd, for the RDF store.

[ctieben]

The geos++ lib is also on the deprecated list! (Hint: Back to the C Lib)

[niniemann]

I just took a quick look at drobilla/serd. It seems like it is really just a library for reading/writing RDF, but does not support any query functionality. It's not a triple store...

No geos++ would be rather bad. :-/

[ctieben]

There aren't much alternatives to soprano

There is a owlcpp lib with an FaCT++ names reasoner but these also based on librdf. The librdf has a SPARQL Query lib on its own, called Rasqal.

But booth are out of development since years.

A list of semantic web libs could be found here:
https://github.com/semantalytics/awesome-semantic-web#programming

The python RDFLib is one of the few libs that are currently active.

[niniemann]

I've seen owlcpp before, but I think there was a reason I didn't use it. I guess because it's coupled (how tightly?) to FaCT++, which is GPL.

Maybe librdf and rasqal is the best choice... I'm just not a big fan of C.

[ctieben]

I´m either. Its feels more like a step backward instead of forward.

By the way before we try to wrap (because nobody like to use it in modern C++ in the direct way) the old C stuff we also could take the maintenance of soprano with qt5.

[niniemann]

We wouldn't need to create a complete wrapper but just use the old C stuff for the few things we need -- i.e. the SPARQL queries, and reading turtle/n3/rdf-xml files. Not using soprano would also get rid of the qt dependency, which would be nice.

[ctieben]

For now I prefer to basically maintain soprano with qt5 as long as needed and with package build and ppa for an easy installation.