Into the Woods

After several months, I finally got around to releasing a new version of Jastor on http://jastor.sourceforge.net.

For those of you who typically read my blog for my outdoor misadventures, as part of my job as a software engineer at IBM, I manage a couple open-source software projects. Open source software are programs that companies or individuals make freely available on the internet for people to try and critique. Not only is the software free, but the source code of the computer program is also made available. Open source software is excellent for everyone involved. This particular project helps Java programmers transition to the Semantic Web.

Jastor 1.0.4 Changes/Features/Fixes

- Jena 2.4 Compatibility

- Individuals with rdf:type that matches a class in the ontology are given constants in the interface for that class

- owl:oneOf Enumerated Classes assure that the members are generated as individuals in the class and are checked during creation of objects. Anonymous enumerated classes specified as property ranges generate a dummy class with individuals to use.

- previously, rdf:type statements for every class in the type hierarchy would be added to new individuals created through the factory. Now, by request, this behavior is configurable via the generation flag addAllRDFTypesInHierarchy. The default behavior remains to add all the types.

- Open domain properties (null domain, rdfs:Resource, owl:Thing) are now added to every class in the ontology in which it was defined. The previous behavior was to ignore such open domain properties unless a class had a restriction on that property.

- Literal fixes - configuration of typed vs. plain literals - in typedLiteral mode, the getters of propertie return null unless the literal value is typed properly. This may be a bit less convenient in some cases, however, it is semantically more correct.

- If a class has two properties with the same local name (different NS), Jastor 1.0.4 will create a prefix for the conflicting names. Optionally, these prefixes may be manually configured in the JastorContext or in the Ant build.xml

- Generation time performance has been improved by caching the results of OntologyClass.listProperties(…).

- Various other bug fixes and tweaks that I was not dilligent enough to record.