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---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mitch Pronschinske <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:22 PM Subject: Re: A few questions about Clerezza for DZone Article To: Reto Bachmann-Gmuer <[email protected]> Hi Reto, Here's the article: http://java.dzone.com/articles/clerezza-apache-project It's done pretty well so far. -Mitch On Feb 17, 2010, at 2:50 AM, Reto Bachmann-Gmuer wrote: Thanks Mitchell, http://incubator.apache.org/clerezza/ should very soon (in a couple of hours) contain at least a link to the maven generated site and the proposal so that this URL can usefully be referenced. Cheers, reto On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 5:00 AM, Mitch Pronschinske <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for the great responses, Reto. I'll send you the link when I post the article. All the best, Mitch On Feb 16, 2010, at 1:43 PM, Reto Bachmann-Gmür wrote: Hi Mitchell See my responses inline. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mitch Pronschinske <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:50 PM Subject: A few questions about Clerezza for DZone Article To: Bertrand Delacretaz <[email protected]> Hello Bertrand, Thanks for your help with that Apache CXF DOSGi article a few months ago. I found another interesting project that you are working on at Apacher. I had a couple of questions prepared in this email about the Clerezza project. Along with the information on the incubator page, I was going to use your answers to write an introductory article on Clerezza. You can answer these questions via email when it's most convenient for you. :-) When did Clerezza begin and when did it enter the incubator? Development was started by the startup company trialox.org at the end of 2008. Trialox.org was founded by a software and a web company in collaboration with the University of Zurich to build an open source modular and semantic CMS. Clerezza is the foundation of this CMS, it was accepted for apache incubation in November 2009. The original idea for this came up after it was presented at an IKS workshop in Rome[1], the IKS was looking at a foundation for prototyping and several apache committers were present at the workshop. What were the motivations behind creating this project? The project has two aspects web application development and RDF storage and manipulation. We believe that combining this two aspects in an integrated platform makes it easy to create powerful data-centric web applications. Most existing web development frameworks tend to hide away core concepts of the Web (Rest, Uri, Representations) to emulate a desktop applications environment, due this the application built with them do not benefit from core features of the web: scalability, device independence (and thus accessibility), collaboration (with persistent "deep" Uris). Clerezza by contrast is designed ground up to leverage the power of the web-stack, and is not mapping these neither to desktop paradigms nor to traditional RDMS database model, as the RDF (linked data) model is much more flexible and seamlessly extends web concepts. How's the community shaping up around this project so far? The proposal generated a lot of interest, a few persons not previously involved have started contributing. Especially noteworthy is that Tommaso Teofili started implementing the integration with apache UIMA. It is essential that we will have a website featuring tutorials as soon as possible. (There's a bit of a dely here, as we want to use clerezza to produce this website). Who are its key supporters? (and respective companies) Several major contributors (me, Manuel) work for Trialox, Bertrand works for Day, Tommaso for Sourcesense, Hasan for the University of Zurich How far along is the project on the initial list of goals? The main hindrance is the lack of accessible documentation, the experience has shown that new developers can start developing on top of clerezza, but till know some individual coaching was necessary for this. "Clerezza allows to develop applications that integrate perfectly in the Semantic Web providing all accessible resources in machine understandable formats without imposing additional burdens on the developer." Is the understandable format RDF? yes (in its different serialization including rdf/json) What "additional burdens" does it spare for developers? with traditional architectures one would typically have to create additional templates or scripts to create RDF representations. What "tedious database related tasks" in traditional web development are eliminated because of the back-end required RDF model? - In RDF one can basically add any property to any resource, with RDBMS this typically requires a change of the database schema. - With RDBMS there is no intrinsic mapping between database entities and URIs, i.e. the application has to provide this Since the JAX-RS implementation is based on wymiwyg WRHAPI, can it only run on Jetty, or could it run on Tomcat too? Currently the WRHAPI implementation used maps to the default OSGi http service, the jetty based implementation can be used as an alternative (e.g. to have clerezza listen on multiple ports). While it is generally to write new backends for wrhapi, it seems that tomcat is less suited to run in an OSGi container. What might be useful here is integrating the whole OSGi container in a webapplication, so Clerezza could be deployed as a war-archive to any JEE web container. What part does the OSGi play in Clerezza? Clerezza is fully based on OSGi. OSGi is a very lightweight approach to offer the modularization and dynamism missing in standard java. By using OSGi services it can also interoperate with Spring-DS or Peaberry applications. Is there any special advantage for using it in Semantic Web applications? The issues addressed by OSGi do not overlap with those addressed by RDF. With REST the overlapping is small, OSGi provides fine grained modularization typically within a single virtual machine while REST interfaces are generally used for interaction between different and distributed agents. Thanks to Jax-Rs the same interface can be exposed for faster local consumption as OSGi service as well as for cross-platform access via REST. I've heard that things like RDF and the Semantic Web are currently of interest in mainly 'academic' circles and not of interest to average developers. Is that true? RDF and the semantic web offer a wide range of possibilities, including some quite freaky artificial intelligence stuff. This audience and connotation has probably scared away many developer who could benefit from the flexibility of RDF. Recently howver, these technologies are becoming increasingly popular with developers and industry, mainly with the label "linked data". Will Clerezza be usable for the average developer? Our aim is to make Clerezza a platform onto which it shall be very easy to develop applications. By supporting scripting language it shall also serve the need of non-java developers. For developing in java, we found that Clerezza is easier to grasp for relatively unexperienced developers than for mainstream enterprise developers, it seems taht once you got used to the rigidity of SQL and JEE you get dizzy at the flexibility of Clerezza. Where did the name come from [always the most important question:-) ] ? Clerezza means clarity in Rumantsch[2], which is what exactlywhat we want to provide, clarity with the connotation of the solid mountains, the pure water and the fresh air of the region where Heidi[3] rejected the overfloading with useless books and vanity of Frankfurt and finds a way to regain the focus to what really matters to her. Is there anything else about Clerezza (its current status or future plans) that you'd like to share? To get real benefit out of the information we have access to, both as individuals and as society we most urgently need to address the challenge of information overfloading. In my opinion the most promising approach is collaborative filtering and recommendation as well as semantic web technology, Clerezza should be the best foundation to build such applications, join us! ___ Thanks. Let me know if there's any confusion about a question. Thanks for your interest! Let me know if there's any confusion about my answers, or new questions. Cheers, reto 1. http://www.iks-project.eu/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=3 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumantsch_Grischun 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi __________ Mitchell Pronschinske News Writer, DZone [email protected] +1 919-678-0300 ext.107 __________ Mitchell Pronschinske Staff Writer, DZone [email protected] 919-678-0300 ext.107
