[Versa] Welcome to the Versa list

[Uche Ogbuji]

Versa scrapped its way into being a very usable RDF query language,
picked up a good number of fans, and found a good amount of use in the
field.  Unfortunately, it never went through the polish stage of a
proper 1.0 release.

Based on Versa's history, however, there seem to be a number of openings
for Versa's continued development, and I think the time is right to
pursue these seriously.  I think that Versa can be a good alternative to
SPARQL, a path-oriented view of an RDF graph model as an alternative to
SPARQL's aggregate view.  I don't know whether I'd go as far as to say
that Versa could be the RELAX NG to SPARQL's WXS, but there is some
temptation to the parallel.

In the coming weeks, I'll be leading discussion that I hope will lead
quickly to a draft of Versa 2.0 (even the version designation is open to
discussion).  I look forward to thoughts and comments from any
interested party.

Meanwhile, if you need a refresher on Versa or would like to try to get
anyone else on board, here are some resources:

Versa home page (for now): http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/rdf/versa/
Chime's article on Versa: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/07/20/versa.html
Uche's article on Versa:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think10/

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
Use CSS to display XML, part 2 - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss2-i.html
XML Output with 4Suite & Amara - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/20/py-xml.html
Use XSLT to prepare XML for import into OpenOffice Calc - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-oocalc/
Schema standardization for top-down semantic transparency - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think31.html