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Strategies for dealing with text-based data models

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Ethan Gruber

Strategies for dealing with text-based data models

I'm doing some work with linked data in Orbeon. My plan is to take VoID RDF (http://www.w3.org/TR/void/) for a data dump, perform a consistency check, and post into a triplestore, should the data dump pass the check. This is not terribly difficult, assuming I receive RDF/XML. However, the linked data community is rapidly trending away from XML toward Turtle and JSON-LD. I saw a Github issue about implementing JSON support in XForms 2.0 (https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/issues/759).

I know that you can use replace="text" on the submission to get Turtle or JSON, but how do you process this? I'm looking for advice on how to get started. There's a java library distributed by Jena that converts RDF models (https://jena.apache.org/documentation/javadoc/jena/jena/rdfcat.html), but it doesn't support JSON-LD yet. The most robust library for dealing with RDF conversions is rdflib for Python. I have two questions:

1. Is there documentation or examples for getting external java libraries to function in Orbeon, say, with XPL?

2. Is it possible to execute a command line operation which could execute a python script that uses rdflib to perform the necessary RDF conversions?

I think there's tremendous potential in using Orbeon to manage linked data workflows, so I'm hoping I can get it to support other RDF models.

Thanks,
Ethan

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Alessandro Vernet

Re: Strategies for dealing with text-based data models

Administrator

Hi Ethan,

Until we have native support for JSON, my thinking is that it might be better to use a "proxy" that transforms JSON data on its way into Orbeon Forms, and if necessary from XML to JSON on the way out. Otherwise, I think that if you try to deal with text from XForms, you'll need to use contrived constructs to achieve your purpose and will end up feeling you're just using the wrong tool for the job.

Alex

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Stian Sigvartsen

Re: Strategies for dealing with text-based data models

In reply to this post by Ethan Gruber

Hi Ethan

Bar one issue with exceptions being thrown by Orbeon for invalid UTF-8
character encoding on occasion when speaking to Twitter APIs, this
approach that Alex describes has worked really well for me. I have
implemented JSON to XML conversation for handling HTTP responses. This
is implemented as a HTTP forwarding proxy so Orbeon Forms is unawares it
is even taking place.

I'm happy to elaborate on my approach if this would be useful to you,
but you sound pretty knowledgeable about the problem domain so suspect
you may already know how to implement such a solution.

-Stian

-----Original Message-----
From: Alessandro Vernet [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: 10 March 2014 06:35
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [orbeon] Re: Strategies for dealing with text-based data models

Hi Ethan,

Until we have native support for JSON, my thinking is that it might be
better to use a "proxy" that transforms JSON data on its way into Orbeon
Forms, and if necessary from XML to JSON on the way out. Otherwise, I
think that if you try to deal with text from XForms, you'll need to use
contrived constructs to achieve your purpose and will end up feeling
you're just using the wrong tool for the job.

Alex

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