This is a short blog post to announce a project I’ve been working on in my spare time. Pho, is a Ruby client for the Talis Platform. Its hosted on Rubyforge so getting started couldn’t be easier:

gem install pho


Will download and install the Pho gem, along with the documentation which you can also read online.

The distribution comes with a couple of example scripts that show how to add items to the Content Box, perform SPARQL queries, check status of a store, etc.

However the API currently does a lot more than that giving you full access to all of the core Platform services including: storing binary data & RDF metadata, SPARQL queries, faceted browsing, job control, store configuration options, etc.

There’s still plenty of work to be done but at version 0.3 I think there’s enough functionality available that you can build useful applications using the API. For example there’s sufficient code there now to use the library to script some simple data management activities for publishing or managing data in the Platform, or to build a simple linked data browser. I hope to post examples of doing exactly those things over the next few weeks, as I’m planning some updates to my space data store (briefly described here) that will be handled using Pho.

The next steps are to plug some of the gaps in the API  — specifically parsing of search results, access to the job metadata we exposed in version 21, and better support for changeset management. I’m also going to explore some simple Ruby-RDF mapping functionality. The latter should help turn Pho into something that can provide the core functionality required for building linked data backed applications.

I’d love to get feedback on this, so feel free to post bug reports or feature suggestions either on the Rubyforge project or the n2-dev mailing list.