Jena XX
Date: August 27, 2020 - 5pm London, 6pm Berlin and 12pm New York and 9am San Francisco Time
Chapter: Global
Event ID:
Location: web video chat
20 years of Jena an RDF API for Java
On a Monday August 28, 2000 Brian McBride a HP employee at Bristol Labs in the UK announced a new RDF API on the W3C RDF mailing list, having contemplated ideas for a RDF API for the Java ecosystem for some time. Long before the project became a top level Apache project on April 18, 2012 it was simply known as Jena. But at that point Jena already had a long history for an open source project dedicated to the Semantic Web activity at the W3C.
But Jena today is more than a simple Java implementation of the RDF specifications. Over the years many new innovations were introduced that shaped the RDF landscape itself significantly. Among them are query languages for RDF and the HTTP RDF server enabling RESTful SPARQL endpoints just to mention a few. Many of these contributions later found their expression in W3C recommendations. Others entered the RDF world as independent contributions in the form of extensions to the core project such as GeoSPARQL and JenaBeans. But all still enabled and inspired by the availability of open core features in the Jena API. At this lotico event we are going to celebrate and recall some Jena milestones and learn from contributors about the state of the art.