Comment by PaulHoule
3 years ago
I use CPython most of the time but PyPy was a real lifesaver when I was doing a project that bridged EMOF and RDF, particularly I was working with moderately sized RDF models (say 10 million triples) with rdflib.
With CPython, I was frustrated with how slow it was, and complained about it to the people I was working with, PyPy was a simple upgrade that sped up my code to the point where it was comfortable to work with.
That is a great idea! I use rdflib frequently and never thought to try it with PyPy. Now I will.
Is your group still using it?
That particular code has been retired because after a quite a bit of trying things that weren’t quite right we understood the problem and found a better way to do it. I’m doing the next round of related work (logically modeling XSLT schemas and associated messages in OWL) in Java because there is already a library that almost does was I want.
I am still using this library that I wrote
https://paulhoule.github.io/gastrodon/
to visualize RDF data so even if I make my RDF model in Java I am likely to load it up in Python to explore it. I don’t know if they are using PyPy but there is at least one big bank that has people using Gastrodon for the same purpose.
What do you use RDF models for?
So I wrote this library
https://paulhoule.github.io/gastrodon/
which makes it very easy to visualize RDF data with Jupyter by turning SPARQL results into data frames.
Here are two essays I wrote using it
https://ontology2.com/essays/LookingForMetadataInAllTheWrong...
https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...
People often think RDF never caught on but actually there are many standards that are RDF-based such as RSS, XMP, ActivityPub and such that you can work on quite directly with RDF tools.
Beyond that I’ve been on a standards committee for ISO 20022 where we’ve figured out, after quite a few years of looking at the problem, how to use RDF and OWL as a master standard for representing messages and schemas in financial messaging. In the project that needed PyPy we were converting a standard represented in EMOF into RDF. Towards the end of last year I figured out the right way to logically model the parts of those messages and the associated schema with OWL. That is on its way of becoming one of those ISO standard documents that unfortunately costs 133 swiss franc. I also figured out that it is possible to do the same for many messages defined with XSLT and I’m expecting to get some work applying this to a major financial standard and I think there will be some source code and a public report on that.
Notably the techniques I use address quite a few problems with the way most people use RDF, most notably many RDF users don’t use the tools available to represented ordered collections, a notable example with this makes trouble is in Dublin Core for document (say book) metadata where you can’t represent the order of the authors of a paper which is something the authors usually care about a great deal. XMP adapts the Dublin Core standard enough to solve this problem, but with the techniques I use you can use RDF to do anything any document database can, though some SPARQL extensions would make it easier.