DAML dotnetAPI Home | About DAML | Announcements | Roadmap | Site Search

The DAML dotnetAPI is an implemention of a DAML and RDF API for the .NET framework.

This toolkit provides a parser and model for reading and writing RDF and DAML files with .NET.

The API is written in C# and is based on the Jena API (note). The parser is based on the XMarksTheDot RDF.NET parser, which in turn makes use of the .NET XML parser. Please don't direct dotnetAPI questions to these projects, they are not responsible for this code.

Features

The following extensions to the basic Jena API have been added:

• Runs in the .NET framework
• Source file tracking - The source file is stored with each statement. You can save portions of a model associated with a single source.
• Statements about statements are supported using statement IDs which can be assigned when a statement is created (otherwise a unique ID is generated). Statement IDs are maintained during file reads and writes. It does not recognize or generate "reification triples".

License

DAML dotnetAPI is Open Source and free to use.

• Jena License Details
• BBN License Details

Limitations

The DAML dotnetAPI has the following limitations:

• There are portions of the Jena API that have not been implemented, particularly Containers and DAML Datatype Translation.
• The RDF parser has not been tested against the set of RDF test files, and probably doesn't correctly parse some of the more recent RDF additions nor any exotic RDF syntax.
• The .NET XML parser has problems with entity substitution in namespaces. So don't do it. See test1.daml. We put together a workaround by passing all input files through the a COM MSXML XSL transform. The same transform also converts daml:collection items into the corresponding List structure. This workaround can be turned on at the model level by setting model._cleanLoad=true before doing any reads.
• There are probably more bugs. Please report them to David Rager. Include a simple code/data example if possible.

Tutorial, Documentation, and Examples

We currently do not have a tutorial and the documentation is very sparse. But because the API is based on Jena, the Jena Tutorial and Documentation should be of some help. Please note that we decided to use dotnet naming standards so method names are now capitalized. Also a few methods are now dotnet get/set properties.

A few examples from the DAML+OIL section of the Jena Tutorial are available. Since exercises in the tutorial build upon each other I have only converted the 'final' files. In addition Example1.cs shows how to read a DAML file into a Model and print the classes.

Questions and Comments should be sent to David Rager (see below). The Jena developers are not involved with the .NET API so they are unable to answer any questions.

The following packages are available:

dotnetAPI-dll.zip	Main dll and a few supporting dll files. This is a DEBUG build of the project, so its a little bigger and slower because of the extra debugging information.
dotnetAPI-src.zip	Source files
dotnetAPI-doc.zip	Documentation files - they're quite sparse. Portions of the Jena javadocs should be useful. Particularly the following packages: com.hp.hpl.jena.daml com.hp.hpl.jena.daml.common com.hp.hpl.mesa.rdf.jena.common com.hp.hpl.mesa.rdf.jena.mem com.hp.hpl.mesa.rdf.jena.model

Acknowledgements

• Jason Diamond for the XMarksTheDot RDF.NET parser.
• The Jena Project

Authors