History and Status
Versa's origins can be traced to 2000, when professional XML consultancy Fourthought, Inc. began developing RIL, an open, XML-based RDF Inference Language. RIL was implemented briefly in Fourthought's 4Suite Server product, which allowed for persistent storage and querying of an RDF model and associated XML document store.
In October 2001, the query portion of RIL was spun off into a separate project named Versa, with the intent that after Versa stabilized, development would resume to establish RIL as a formal language for working Versa query results. RIL development never resumed, however; inference abilities in 4Suite were easily handled by XSLT extensions and did not need a separate language.
Versa initially had limits that required the language to be redesigned. The overhaul was performed in late 2001 and early 2002 by software engineers from Sun Microsystems and Fourthought, to facilitate internal knowledge management applications at Sun and to drive applications that were in development for Fourthought's other clients. 4Suite's Versa library was used as the reference implementation, and a draft specification was published.
Versa development slowed in 2002, although Sun and Fourthought continued to work together to develop Versa based applications through 2004. In mid-2005, Chimezie Ogbuji and Daniel Krech began planning to fold the abilities of 4Suite's outdated RDF libraries (4RDF), including Versa support, into RDFLib, which offers complementary features and would allow Versa to be used independently of 4Suite. This coincided with renewed interest in refining the Versa draft specification and publishing a "1.0" version.
As of 2006, the development of Versa is being coordinated primarily by Chimezie and Uche Ogbuji of Fourthought.
Read more about this topic: Versa (query Language)
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or status:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)