Sesame 2.0-rc2 fixes various bugs that have been found in the previous release candidate. We strongly advise everyone who is currently using 2.0-rc1 to update their Sesame libraries.

Thank you all for testing the first release candidate and for reporting the issues that you have encountered. These issues should all be fixed in this new release. In case you encounter any other issues, please let us know!

The complete change log can be found in the here.

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• Sesame API javadoc
• distribution files

We're out of beta!

After two years of hard work, with ten alpha- and beta releases, we are now nearing the completion of Sesame 2.0. The first Release Candidate for Sesame 2.0 has just been released, and it fixes the last few blocking issues for 2.0. To summarize the most important changes:

• The transaction isolation of the RDF stores has been reworked, the behaviour is now equivalent to the behaviour in JDBC/relational databases. As a result, the stores are now also better able to handle concurrent requests.
• Inferencing support has much improved. There is now a generic RDF Schema inferencer that replaces the store-specific inferencers and that fixes the issues with the existing inferencers. This new inferencer can be used on top of memory- and native stores. The "direct type hierarchy" inferencer (previously: virtual property inferencer), which infers the directType, directSubClassOf and directSubPropertyOf statements, can optionally be stacked on top of the RDF Schema inferencer. Performance for both inferencers has been also been improved.
• SPARQL support was further improved; query result ordering (ORDER BY) is now available.

Important update notice: Due to the changes in the inferencers, existing repositories that use an inferencer (e.g. "memory-rdfs") need to be reconfigured to use the new inferencer. This can be most easily done using the Sesame Console by dropping the concerning repositories and then re-creating them with the the same parameters. The existing data should be preserved in this process.

The complete change log can be found in the here.

We expect to be able to release the 2.0-final release in a few weeks. Any issues that surface in this release will have our full attention and will be fixed as soon as possible. So if you encounter any problems, please let us know via the forum or the issue tracker.

While you're here, you might as well have a look at our new poll.

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• Sesame API javadoc
• distribution files

We just released the sixth beta release for Sesame 2.0. We have put the three months since the previous release to good use. Highlights for this release are:

• SPARQL support
  Sesame now supports most of the SPARQL query language. There are only two things that remain on the TODO list for the next release: query result ordering (ORDER BY) and proper dataset support (partially implemented now).
• Improved query optimizer
  Until this release, the query optimizer only performed some fairly basic optimizations. This query optimizer has been improved considerably in this release, resulting in considerable to dramatic improvements to query evaluation performance.
• Console useability
  Feedback indicated that managing repository configurations using the console wasn't very intuitive. This has been improved, among other things. Please consult the (updated) user guide for instructions.

A complete overview of improvements can be found in the changelog.

We expect this release to be the last beta release for Sesame 2.0. Focus for the next release (Release Candidate 1) will be the transaction handling of the Sail implementations.

Thank you all for trying out the previous releases and for providing us with your feedback!

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• Sesame API javadoc
• distribution files

Elmo 1.0-beta1 is the start of the API stabilization period leading towards 1.0-final. This release targets easier adoption and the addition of some missed tools from earlier versions. Highlights to the API are better support for JPA including merge and refresh support, simplification of annotations and interceptors, more options for code generation, and easier to use concepts. This release also marks the come back of scutter and smusher with an updated interface. Thanks to everyone who participated through the rocky alpha cycle, but we promise smoother upgrades in the beta cycle.

Available resources:

• Distribution packages
• Elmo User Guide (also available as PDF or one large HTML file)
• API reference
• Source reference
• Release notes
• Source code (SVN)

Sesame 2.0-beta5 is a bugfix release that contains many large and small improvements in functionality and performance. Some changes worth mentioning explicitly are:

• the RDF model objects now implement Serializable
• RIO now has support for the TriG serialization format
• a bug in the HTTP communication preventing querying of inferred triples has been fixed
• various improvements in the behaviour and performance of the OpenRDF Workbench and the Console

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• distribution files

Sesame 1.2.7 and Rio 1.0.10 wrap up a number of bug fixes that have been uncovered over the past months. Also, thanks to Stephen Allen of BBN Technologies, the memory consumption required to add (large) RDF files to an HTTPRepository has been significantly reduced.

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• distribution files for Sesame 1.2.7
• distribution files for Rio 1.0.10

Aduna, the driving force behind Sesame, is looking for junior and senior Java software engineers. Want to work at the forefront of new semantic technologies? Have a look at the job descriptions on the Aduna website!

Elmo 1.0-alpha4 contains a large amount of API changes. This release now supports dynamic modules, behaviour factories, and behaviour rules.

Available resources:

• Elmo User Guide (also available as PDF or one large HTML file)
• distribution files

Main new feature of Sesame 2.0-beta4 is its RDF-based server configuration. All Sesame server now have a SYSTEM repository that stores configuration data, the old XML-based configuration mechanism is now deprecated. Further, this release contains some API refinements and a number of important bug fixes.

NOTE: when you update an existing server to this new release, you will have to redo the server configuration. Please read the chapter on server installation in the user manual for more info.

Available resources:

• Sesame User Guide (also available as one large HTML file)
• distribution files

Elmo 1.0-alpha3 is an update for the latest Sesame 2.0-beta3. Better logging and a new interface for the code-generator are the highlights in this release. This release also includes new annotations and some bug fixes. Thanks to everyone who gave feed-back, it is appreciated.

Available resources:

• Elmo User Guide (also available as PDF or one large HTML file)
• distribution files

Sesame 2.0-beta3 addresses a number of smaller and larger bugs and improvements, including several issues in the HTTP client-server communication, such as the clear operation and the handling of context.

For a full overview of fixes and improvements, see the Release Notes.

Sesame 2.0-beta3 can be found in our download section. The Javadoc API and user documentation are also available.

Elmo 1.0-alpha2 is an update for the latest Sesame 2.0-beta2. It also includes a few bug fixes and updates. Of note in this release is new StatementRealiserRepository wrapper that adds partial transaction isolation support. This release also includes a big departure in the provided concepts jar. To avoid property collision, all property names in the provided concepts are prefixed. This release, however, is still compatible with the previous concepts.jar.

Elmo User Guide can be viewed and downloaded as HTML or PDF.
Elmo can be downloaded from here.

Sesame 2.0-beta2 addresses a number of smaller and larger bugs and improvements, including a problem in the maven dependencies that broke development against beta1 for developers using maven, a few fixes related to the handling of context varargs, and a number of concurrency issues in the SailConnection.

For a full overview of fixes and improvements, visit the ChangeLog.

Sesame 2.0-beta2 can be found in our download section. The Javadoc API and user documentation are also available.

Elmo is a JavaBean pool implementation for the Sesame RDF repository. Specifically, Elmo is a subject-oriented RDF Bean pool that allows JavaBeans to be cast to different roles and provides a unique context specific view of the subject.

New features in this release include:

• Better documentation with lots of examples;
• Chained behaviour methods;
• Interceptors;
• Concept Generator from OWL ontology;
• Undo support;
• Data context support.

Elmo User Guide can be viewed and downloaded as HTML or PDF.
Elmo can be downloaded from here.

We are ecstatic to be able to announce the first beta release of Sesame 2.0! Sesame 2.0-beta1 marks the end of architectural changes to Sesame 2 and allows us to focus on adding features and fixing bugs, and you to finally see the Sesame 2 API as it is meant to be. You can find the latest version in the download section.

So what's new in Sesame 2.0-beta1 compared to previous alpha releases?

• Repository, Sail and Query APIs stable.
  We have moved from alpha-stage to beta-stage, meaning that the core APIs, the interfaces and method signatures, are now frozen and stable. This ensures that you as a developer will be able to upgrade to future releases without fear of breaking your application. See the JavaDoc API documentation and the user documentation for more details.
• Improved Context Support.
  We have improved the way Sesame handles contexts, allowing developers to freely access any combination of zero, one or more contexts in a single repository. Use of Java 5's vararg feature ensure a flexible, easy-to-use API.
• Sesame 2.0 Web Client.
  beta1 features the first release of a web client for Sesame servers. This web client can be deployed as a webapp and can be used to conviently query and modify a Sesame repository running on a (remote or local) Sesame 2.0 server.

For a more complete and detailed overview of changes, see the ChangeLog.

Of course, we would not call it beta if there were not some things missing as well. Our ToDo list includes:

• A MySQL storage backend is under development but not yet available in this rlease.
• Custom inferencing is not yet available.
• The SPARQL query engine does not yet support ordering and a few other language features.
• Fine-grained security on repositories is not yet available.

As remarked before, this beta release marks an important step in Sesame 2.0 development: instead of focusing our development efforts on the core structure and architecture we can now start paying attention to (aforementioned and other) features. You can expect regular beta releases as we add more of the 'good stuff'.

Of course, we owe a great debt to the many contributors and co-developers of Sesame 2. Thank you all for your patience, and we hope you are as pleased with the result as we are.

Deliriously yours,
     the OpenRDF development team

Hot on the heels of yesterday's Sesame 2.0-alpha4 release is the first alpha release the next major Elmo revision. This is a major step from previous versions. Elmo is a role based Java persistent bean pool. It provides a simple API to access ontology oriented data inside a Sesame repository. It separates interfaces and classes into unique reusable concepts and behaviours that are stitched together at runtime to provide context-specific views of the same subject.

Elmo 0.9-alpha can be downloaded here.

Also available just in time for the upcoming ISWC conference in Athens, Georgia, USA, is the next alpha release of Aperture, a content and metadata extraction framework based on Sesame (alpha3 in this case, although an update to the latest and greatest code is planned for the near future). The most notable feature in this release is a new IcalCrawler. It works with iCal files generated by many calendaring applications (Apple iCal, Korganizer, Lotus Notes ...). It uses an ical-rdf mapping developed by the W3C Rdf Calendaring group. Apart from that there are numerous small improvements and bugfixes. The tutorial has been expanded with more code examples and UML diagrams to facilitate learning for new users.

Aperture 2006.1-alpha-3 can be downloaded here.

We are very pleased to announce the fourth (and hopefully final) alpha-release of Sesame 2. Sesame 2.0-alpha4 is a release that fixes a large number of issues with the previous alpha releases. It features major improvements in the Repository and SAIL APIs and a completely redesigned query engine for SeRQL and SPARQL. Additionally this release finally has a HTTPSail which enables transparent client-server communication with Sesame repositories over HTTP.

Sesame 2.0-alpha4 can be found in the download section.

What is new in alpha4?

• Sesame is now available under a BSD-style license, previous releases are still available under LGPL.
• The Repository and Sail APIs have been revised to use JDBC-style connections.
• The SeRQL query engine has been been replaced with an all new generic query engine that is modelled after the relational algebra for RDBMS's.
• Sesame now has partial support for SPARQL. Ask and describe queries are not yet supported, as well as a number of the SPARQL built-in functions.
• Sesame now has an HTTPSail, which allows clients to transparently communicate with a server over HTTP.
• The semantics of SeRQL set operations have changed: the results of the operands are now combined based on the variable bindings they produce. This means that you have to take care that the operands use the same variables names (or use aliases).
• The REST-style HTTP protocol has been improved. The new protocol is NOT backwards compatible with older versions.
• The Sesame code has been completely modularized into logical units, which makes it easier to reuse parts of Sesame in other projects.
• The Ant-based build system has been replaced with a Maven-based build system.
• The source code has been moved from SourceForge's CVS server to Aduna's SVN server: https://src.aduna-software.org/svn/org.openrdf/

Known issues

• This release contains a HUGE amount of changes to the code and, as a result, is expected to contain a considerable number of bugs.
• The new query engine currently lacks a query optimizer. Because of this you may see inferior query evaluation performance compared to earlier releases.

See the ChangeLog for details on the changes and improvements.

Sesame 1.2.6 features a major improvement in the performance of the SeRQL string-comparison operator (LIKE) on MySQL and PostgreSQL backends. Improvement factors of 10 to 100 have been seen on several test queries.

Furthermore, a number of other issues were fixed, most notably a problem in the native store potentially causing data corruption.

More detailed information can be found in the release notes for Sesame 1.2.6 and the release notes for Rio 1.0.9. Of course, you can also head straight for the Download section.

Sesame 1.2.5 is primarily a bug-fix release that fixes a number of issues that have been uncovered in previous releases. Sesame 1.2.5 includes Rio 1.0.8, which has an updated Turtle parser that allows upper case language tags to be used.

Of special interest to maven users: thanks to Jason Johnston these releases are now also available from ibiblio's maven2 repository.

More detailed information can be found in the release notes for Sesame 1.2.5 and the release notes for Rio 1.0.8. Of course, you can also head straight for the Download section.

We will be hosting a tutorial/workshop session at the upcoming European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2006), on June 11.

The title of the tutorial is "Application Development with the Sesame Framework" and the session will be co-presented by Jeen Broekstra and Arjohn Kampman of Aduna, Atanas Kiryakov of OntoText, and Peter Mika of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This tutorial aims at giving Semantic Web application developers and researchers an introduction into the many features and possiblities of the Sesame RDF framework, including advanced querying using SeRQL and SPARQL, using the Sesame Java APIs for programmatic manipulation of large RDF graphs, and doing scalable OWL reasoning using the OWLIM reasoner plugin.

The tutorial starts with a basic introduction into RDF and the Sesame framework. Next, an introduction into the use RDF query languages like SeRQL and SPARQL will be given, after which attendees can get hands-on experience by means of some simple excercises. We then shift focus on the use of the Sesame framework as part of application development, highlighting features of the API, and the way in which to communicate with the system either locally or remotely. We move on to introduce Elmo, a set of tools and Java Beans for cross-use ontologies such as FOAF, and in the final session we will discuss scalable OWL reasoning in Sesame using OWLIM.

The goal of the tutorial is to make researchers and developers aware of the advantages of using the Sesame framework for their own development work, and giving them the knowledge to get started quickly with using Sesame effectively.

We hope to see you all there!

Sesame 1.2.4 features an improved query optimizer, an improved indexing schema for the RDBMS Sail and fixes for several issues. Sesame 1.2.4 includes Rio 1.0.7, which features an updated Turtle parser & writer and fixes an issue with the RDF/XML parser. The output of the N3 writer has been updated to comply with the current specification; the N3 writer currently uses a Turtle writer internally, which generates N3-compatible documents.

More detailed information can be found in the release notes for Sesame 1.2.4 and the release notes for Rio 1.0.7. Of course, you can also head straight for the Download section.

Sesame 2.0-alpha-3 is a release that fixes a major bug in the SPARQL engine of Sesame 2 (which made it unusable in the previous release). Additionally, it contains a few performance improvements and even a new feature: the command console.

See the ChangeLog for details on the changes and improvements.

We are very pleased to be able to announce the second alpha release of Sesame 2. Sesame 2 is a complete revision of the Sesame framework. New in this release since the previous alpha release are:

• Java 5
  The Sesame APIs now extensively use Java 5 features such as typed collections and safe enumerations. Not only does this make code more robust, but it also actually make client code easier, shorter and clearer.
• Native Store
  The Sesame Native Store backend has been ported to Sesame 2. It now offers scalable storage and querying with reliable persistence and of course includes context support.
• Pull-based Query
  The Sesame query model has been redesigned to allow pull-based querying: through lazy iterators, the client can now actively control when individual query results are returned (instead of having to passively consume whatever the server sends it).

User, system and API documentation is available online. Sesame 2.0-alpha-2 can be downloaded from the download section.

Pike has announced the release of PySesame 0.24. PySesame is a Python wrapper for Sesame's HTTP API. It allows you to do easily access Sesame repositories from your Python script.

CognitiveWeb has announced a beta release of a Sesame SAIL implementation for Oracle 10g. From the release notes:

This is a beta release of an integration of the Oracle(R) 10g RDF support for the openrdf Sesame platform. This release includes a complete implementation of the RdfRepository SAIL interface but does not provide for query rewrites such that RDQL, etc. queries directed to a Sesame instance and answered by this SAIL will not be able to take full advantage of the RDF_MATCH table function. This release does not include an implementation of the RdfSchemaRepository SAIL interface, but it does include a SAIL parameter which may be used to request that Oracle(R) maintain the RDFS closure of the explicitly asserted triples.

The software is available here.

Sesame 1.2.3 and Rio 1.0.6 are both maintenance releases, fixing several issues. Most notably, the Turtle parser has been updated to the latest specs. Details can be found in the release notes for Sesame 1.2.3 and the release notes for Rio 1.0.6. Download pointers for both can be found here.

This release features significant improvements to the core of Elmo, increasing the scalability and efficiency of Elmo applications. Elmo is now also compatible with the Apache Commons BeanUtils package and the Spring Framework.

Please see the changelog for more details and on information about migrating from previous versions. Elmo 0.2 can downloaded from the usual location.

We are very pleased to be able to announce the first alpha release of Sesame 2. Sesame 2 is a complete revision of the Sesame framework, with a number of new main features:

• A revised Repository API that is much more targeted at embedded use of Sesame.
• Support for context, allowing you to keep track of individual RDF data units (like files, for instance).
• Proper transaction/rollback support.
• A REST-ful HTTP protocol that includes support for the SPARQL protocol and SPARQL Query Results XML Format Last Call Working Drafts from the W3C.
• Support for the SPARQL Query Language. The engine was developed by Ryan Levering in a separate open source project.

Documentation for Sesame 2 can be found online:

• User Documentation
  Includes a SeRQL 2 manual and code examples.
• System Design Documentation
  Includes a specification of the HTTP protocol.
• API JavaDoc

The current release is an Alpha release, which means that some parts of the revised API may still undergo changes until the final release, as a result of user feedback (and we strongly urge you to use this opportunity!). Furthermore, Sesame 2 is not yet feature-complete: for example, the Web interface and the RDBMS backend are not yet available.

Nevertheless, we trust that the new features will get you excited about what's coming in Sesame 2, and we invite you to take her out for a spin and report your experiences back to us.

Sesame 2.0-ALPHA-1 can be downloaded from the download section.

Chris Bizer has announced the release of D2RQ 0.4. A major new feature of this release is a wrapper which allows you to use D2RQ together with the Sesame Framework.

From the announcement:

"As Semantic Web technologies are getting mature, there is a growing need for RDF applications to access the content of non-RDF, legacy databases without having to replicate the whole database into RDF. D2RQ is a declarative language to describe mappings between relational database schemata and OWL/RDFS ontologies. The mappings allow RDF applications to access the content of huge, non-RDF databases using Semantic Web query languages like RDQL."

OWLIM is a high-performance semantic repository, packaged as a Storage and Inference Layer (SAIL) for the Sesame RDF database. This new release features major improvements to the upload and reasoning speed as well as extended OWL support. More info can be found at the OWLIM project page.

Sesame 1.2.2 fixes several issues that have been reported in the past two months. Further, the native Sail has been improved considerably in that it now supports multiple triple indexes. Work done by the Simile-project at MIT indicated that this can increase query performance dramatically.

Apart from a number of resolved issues, Rio 1.0.5 features a new "abbreviated RDF/XML writer" that uses several abbreviations to write out RDF/XML data. The resulting output is semantically equivalent to the output of the standard writer, but it is usually easier to read for humans. This writer has been contributed to Rio by Peter Mika as part of his work on Elmo.

Download pointers for both Sesame 1.2.2 and Rio 1.0.5 can be found here.

Ontotext has announced the release of OWLIM 2.0, an improved version of the in-memory OWL DLP reasoner for Sesame. OWLIM 2.0 has been updated to work with Sesame 1.2, and boasts a number of significant other improvements. Details on Ontotext's OWLIM project page.

Bibster, the Sesame-based P2P system for sharing of bibliographical citations, has won the System Innovation Award at the Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) Workshop. Naturally we are proud to have played a small part in this success and want to congratulate the Bibster team!

Sesame 1.2.1 is mainly a bugfix release that fixes a crucial bug in the native Sail and a few other issues. Of special interest is that Sesame now also supports comparisons between xsd:dateTime values, thanks to a contribution by Thomas Beer. A complete list of the changes is available in the issue tracker's Changelog.

The second release today is Elmo 0.1.1. Elmo is a toolkit for developing Semantic Web applications using Sesame. Elmo wraps Sesame, providing a dedicated API for a number of well known web ontologies including Dublin Core, RSS and FOAF. The dedicated API makes it easier to work with RDF data for the supported ontologies. Elmo also offers a set of tools related to the supported ontologies, including an RDF crawler, a FOAF smusher and a FOAF validator.

Elmo 0.1.1 is the first real release of Elmo, following up the 0.1 "test release". Elmo's API is extensible and is expected to cover a larger set of existing web ontologies as it matures. The main developer and driving force behind Elmo is Peter Mika. He welcomes any feedback, suggestions and/or contributions to Elmo through the OpenRDF.org forum. A User guide and API documentation is available from this site.

Download pointers for both Sesame 1.2.1 and Elmo 0.1.1 can be found here.

Jeen Broekstra, one of the main developers of Sesame, successfully defended his thesis on Storage, querying and inferencing for semantic web languages. He now holds the degree of doctor (dr.), but feel free to keep addressing him as "Jeen" ;-)

Jeen has been doing research in the context of the Semantic Web and, more specifically, Sesame. His thesis describes, among other things, OIL (which was later merged with DAML-ONT to DAML+OIL, which evolved to OWL), RDF query languages in general and SeRQL specically, inferencing and truth maintenance. The thesis is available as a zipped PDF file (9.8 MB) from Jeen's home page.

The final release of Sesame 1.2 is now available for download.

The most important new feature of this release is SeRQL revision 1.2. SeRQL 1.2 offers an impressive set of new operations and functional extensions, including:

• Nested queries
• Existential quantification
• Set algebraic operators (union, difference, intersection)
• namespace(), localName() functions
• isBNode(), isURI() functions
• Nested boolean constraints in optional path expressions

Other updates: It is now possible to register an object as a listener on a repository, which will then notify it of content changes. Also, the RDQL engine has been updated to work with the generic SAIL query model, significantly improving performance of the RDQL query engine.

Several other large and small issues and new features are also available in this release. For a full overview of changes see the Changelog.

Michiel Hobbelman has developed rsesame, a Ruby library for communication with Sesame repositories over HTTP. The current feature set includes evaluating SeRQL queries, adding RDF data and clearing a repository, with more to follow soon according to the author.

This brings the number of language bindings for Sesame to a respectable five: Java, Ruby, Delphi, PHP and Python.

The second release candidate of Sesame 1.2 is now available for download.

Release candidate 2 fixes three issues discovered in the first candidate release, one in the SeRQL query engine, one in the RMI subsystem and one in the Configure Sesame startup script. See the Changelog for details.

The first release candidate of Sesame 1.2 is now available for download.

The most important new feature of this release is SeRQL revision 1.2. SeRQL 1.2 offers an impressive set of new operations and functional extensions, including:

• Nested queries
• Existential quantification
• Set algebraic operators (union, difference, intersection)
• namespace(), localName() functions
• isBNode(), isURI() functions
• Nested boolean constraints in optional path expressions

Other updates: It is now possible to register an object as a listener on a repository, which will then notify it of content changes. Also, the RDQL engine has been updated to work with the generic SAIL query model, significantly improving performance of the RDQL query engine.

Several other large and small issues and new features are also available in this release. For a full overview of changes see the Changelog.

Rio 1.0.4 is a bugfix release that addresses three bugs found in earlier versions. For an overview of the changes see the ChangeLog.

Rio 1.0.4 can be found here.

As you possibly have noticed if you are a regular visitor of this site, these pages now contain some advertisements powered by Google AdSense and Amazon.com. OpenRDF.org draws an ever increasing number of visitors and a growing number of support requests on the forums. With this increased popularity comes an increased cost for handling the traffic and supporting users. We hope to cover the increased cost at least partially by running these advertisements, while giving visitors up-to-date info on relevant publications (via Amazon) at the same time.

Jeen Broekstra, one of the main developers of Sesame, has joined the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) as an 'invited expert'. The DAWG is concerned with the creation of a W3C Recommendation for (remote) accessing and querying of RDF repositories. Jeen will bring in his experience with the development of Sesame and, more specifically, SeRQL.

Sesame 1.1.3 fixes two bugs and includes one performance improvement for the memory Sail. Sesame 1.1.3 includes Rio 1.0.3, which fixes an issue with datatyped empty literals. Detailed descriptions of the changes can be found in the Sesame ChangeLog and Rio Changelog. Both packages can be downloaded from SourceForge: Sesame 1.1.3, Rio 1.0.3.

A new section for Plugins and Extensions, contributed by third party developers, has been added to our website. If you have developed some component or extension to the Sesame framework that you would like to see listed here, let us know.

Sesame 1.1 is the most thoroughly tested release in the history of Sesame. It has seen two release candidates which have been downloaded over 800 times in total. Lots of issues have been fixed as a result. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this release!

Highlights of this release are:

• The Graph API, an extension of Sesame's access APIs, allows fine-grained manipulation of RDF models directly from Java.
• The Native Disk Store is a new storage backend that works directly on the file system, without need for a DBMS. It uses B-Tree indexing on binary files for fast, efficient and scalable storage.
• SeRQL revision 1.1 is a syntax revision that makes SeRQL queries even easier to read and write, and makes embedding in XML easier.
• Blank node handling has dramatically improved compared to 1.0.x.
• Lots of issues related to full Unicode support have been fixed.
• RDF Schema inferencing has been updated to be fully compliant with the W3C RDF Semantics Recommendation.
• Support for MS SQL Server as storage backend RDBMS. Thanks to Adam Skutt for providing fixes and suggestions for this.
• The Rio parser now supports the Turtle serialization format.
• Partial OWL reasoning support through Sesame's custom inferencer.
• Fully updated and extended User Documentation, including code examples for use of the Sesame APIs and a new Troubleshooting and FAQ chapter.

A complete list of changes can be found in the Changelog. Download pointers can be found in the download section.

At the International Semantic Web Conference 2004, or ISWC 2004 for short, the winner of the Semantic Web Challenge 2004 was announced. Flink, a social network browser based on FOAF and Sesame that has been developed by Peter Mika (Free University of Amsterdam), was awarded first place in a tough competition. Congratulations to Peter Mika for achieving this great result, and naturally we are proud that Sesame played a role in this success.

In other ISWC news, the Best Paper Award went to An Evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems for Large OWL Datasets by Y. Guo, Z. Pan, and J. Heflin of Lehigh University. The paper describes the application of a benchmark on semantic web knowledge base systems, and compares several systems, including Sesame.

Sesame sponsors the ISWC2004, the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference 2004. We are present in Hiroshima with talks, a demonstration and in the exhibition. All participants receive a Sesame flyer in their conference bag. Every flyer has a small doll attached to it. This so called worry doll stands for Sesame. It takes away your worries ;)

There is a legend amongst the Highland Indian villages of Guatemala: If you have a problem, then share it with a worry doll. Before going to bed, tell one worry to each doll, then place them beneath your pillow. Whilst you sleep, the dolls will take your worries away! If you happen to be visiting the ISWC2004, we suggest you get a hand on one of those worry dolls and get a good night's rest.

With these worry dolls we support fair trade with Guatemaltese indians.