Hi Lawson I would say that there’s a niche of users who are using it, myself included, and that it fulfils specific use cases that only a subset of users are likely to have.
The core RDF patch functionality, readers/writers and APIs has already been mainlined into Jena for some time. rdf-delta being archived likely more reflects the fact that it’s a standalone project that Andy did some time ago and his attention has been focused on more pressing matters - like RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2 support which impact far more users. Also, since rdf-delta was created other technologies have come along to solve the same problem as it using the same building blocks (the RDF patch format) but with more modern and reliable systems for exchanging patches. For example - https://github.com/telicent-oss/jena-fuseki-kafka - (disclaimer: this is something I maintain as part of my $dayjob) but was also something Andy worked on previously when he also worked at the same employer. I don’t expect that aspect of functionality to ever come to mainline Jena because Kafka is one of many possible messaging systems. There’s also lots of ancillary details around solutions like this that are very workload dependent, e.g. our approach has evolved over time a very opinionated batching approach driven by our production workloads. There are lots of other messaging systems, and surrounding integration concerns, such that a purely volunteer driven project Jena can’t/shouldn’t attempt to maintain support for every possible messaging system, configuration combination etc. Jena maintaining the core RDF patch format and API should be sufficient for most people. Jena Fuseki has specifically evolved over the last couple of years to make it easier for projects like ours and others to integrate additional features into Fuseki with minimal friction. Another relevant project that may be of interest to you is Jelly RDF - https://jelly-rdf.github.io/dev/ I believe recent versions have also incorporated support for a custom high-performance encoding of RDF patches. Again, that supports various different messaging systems for streaming patches (and other RDF data) around. Hope this helps, Rob From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, 11 January 2026 at 23:25 To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Future of RDF Patch format Hi Jena community, With RDF Delta <https://github.com/afs/rdf-delta> soon to be archived, my team and I are trying to understand what the future holds for the RDF patch format and the functionality it enables. i.e. - are lots of people using RDF patch logs, - is no one using it, - will RDF patch functionality be mainlined into Jena, - is there some equivalant format/feature coming in Jena v6 that performs the same role, - is there just no interest, and the functionality is not being developed? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help to answer. regards, Lawson Lewis Infrastructure and Development KurrawongAI [emailAddress] [email protected] [website] https://kurrawong.ai
