Semantic Search - Faceted Search and Web 3.0 for Drupal

The (Slowly) Open Sesame article here provides an honest assessment of using Sesame for real world applications.

Here's an excerpt:

The module is being updated to make sure it works well in Java 6 and with the latest Sesame 2.0 release.
There are still a number of bugs with the pilot application. The application is being tested on OSX and will a launch on windows server 2003. The three major hurdles are

• CRUD speed- using a Sesame memory store is very fast, but updates are hard because of the way it reindexed. Hoping this is fixed in 2.0, as I filed a bug about this before.
  

Boris Mann is an important and helpful dude for the Drupal Foundation. He's one of the ringmasters at the conferences I've been to.

He's just written a pleasant article looking at RDF in a positive light.

So I'm no Steve Jobs.

In preparation for the long awaited release, I've also released a beta of a simple module for developing taxonomy rapidly called machine tags. From my project page over at drupal.org:

"
Taxonomy is one of the coolest features of Drupal, allowing the creation of information which is organized and structured. Taxonomy can be key for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

SONIA, when designed a year ago, was meant to be a set of three apis to simplify building PHP apps against various RDF stores. The concept has been proven to work - but a lot of work remains. Here's a rough UML sketch of that work from one year ago.

With over 70 people attending my talk, and many of them very RDF and Semantic Web savvy, the audience made the talk a great success. Stephan from the DERI Galway had some particularly good questions - before and after the talk - the ideas discussed there should lead to quite a lot more interesting work. Stephan's blog post about the event has a picture of me with messy hair as well.

I'm really looking forward to talking tomorrow at Drupalcon. I've got a lot of information to share, looking for feedback, and a new direction clear for Semantic Search. I'm confident the FOSS community will help continue the effort of bringing Drupal content into the next generation of the web, and since I've just moved to Spain, meeting my new neighbors will be great!

When dynamically generating SPARQL for SESAME - I seemed to have gained .5 second by adding filters to the end of the statement. Is SPARQL executed in SESAME in a way that this would make sense?

See the discussion at : http://www.openrdf.org/forum/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=1430

Using the OPTIONAL keyword significantly slows down queries.
Like other simulated aggregate queries it may turn out to be faster to do the OPTIONALS as separate queries. However, I experienced some recent unexplained slowness, and it appears that's coming from the way I'm parsing the results in Sesame to get them back to PHP.

Earlier I experienced slowness with native PHP jason_decode(). Now there is something in the following code block I am doing which is slow. From the log files of the slowest query:

INFO - TIME OF EVAL QUERY: 0.34096098seconds of 0.34096098 total.