It all started 3.5 years ago with a question on BioStar: how can one import RDF into R and because lack of an answer, I hacked up rrdf. Previously, I showed two examples and a vignette. Apparently, it was a niche, and I received good feedback. And it is starting to get cited in literature, e.g. by Vissoci et al. Furthermore, I used it in the ropenphacts package so when I write that up, I like to have something to refer people to for detail about the used rrdf package.

Thus, during the x-mas holidays I wrote up what I had in my mind, resulting in this preprint on the PeerJ PrePrints server, for you to comment on.


Yes, please go ahead, read it, try the package (“install.packages(pkgs=c(“rrdf”))”), ask questions, and comment on the preprint. I anticipate to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal by the end of this month.

Along with the preprint, I updated the rrdf package (now at 2.0.2). These are the changes:

• added methods to read/write RDF from strings
• updated to Apache Jena 2.11 (yeah, I am hardly doing things from scratch)
• remote SPARQLing now skips Jena by default (add jena=TRUE to use it again)
• better conversion of SPARQL results to a matrix
• proper removal of language and types
• better handling of anonymous nodes
• also output variables (columns) if they have no data (thank to Alan Ruttenberg)
• fixed the output of supported formats in documentation and error messages

Have fun!