RDF library for R

[Matt Jones]

Hi rOpenSci-ers,

I've been working on refactoring the rdataone package so that is no longer depends on the difficult-to-install rJava package.  I'm close, but one of the last barriers is the need for an RDF parser and library in R.  The very nice rrdf package is the only RDF package I've found so far, and it is an rJava-based wrapper around the Java JENA rdf library. So I can't use it if my goal is to eliminate the Java dependency.  So, my questions:

1) Does anyone know of a native R RDF package, or one that wraps a C library?

2) If no, would people on rOpenSci have interest in building and maintaining one, possibly based on the mature Redland librdf library that is written in C?  Redland-bindings already has language wrappers for perl, python, ruby, java, javascript, lua, and others, but not R.  The python binding is based on SWIG, and so its possible it might be done with the SWIG support for R as well.

Thoughts on what the best way forward is here?  I'm willing to chip in if others are interested.

Thanks,

Matt

[Scott Chamberlain]

Matt, 

Thanks for the message. Definitely would be a good contribution.

At least Carl and I are interested in working on this. While Carl has C experience, I don't, but would like to learn some here.

Should we start a new repo for this?

Cheers, Scott