TreeHugger

Shellac (Damian Steer) has released a prelliminary version of TreeHugger, an RDFPath plugin thing for Saxon’s XSLT. Very cool indeed. The hope is that XML people will enjoy using RDF without having to see the syntax at all. What I want to persuade him to do now is a Squish to RDFPath converter; it’s not straightforward however – we will lose much of the functionality of XSLT which Saxon provides by passing off the RDFPath in one go to an RDF Query engine, although it should be much faster (and work with databases as well as files). At the moment it creates a tree out of the RDF file that Saxon can understand, so you get all the functionality. Much credit goes to Norm Walsh here for his RDFTwig which does something similar. I think it’s worth cloning the XPath syntax though, hopefully to persuade XSLT peple that RDF is actually very sensible. Unless it confuses them.