LMF Release 2.2.0

We are very happy to announce the availability of our Linked Media Framework, Release 2.2.0, under Apache License (www.newmedialab.at/LMF).

Below you find the text of the announcement on the mailing lists (by Sebastian Schaffert, 06.07.2012):

The Linked Media Framework (LMF) is a Linked Data Server with advanced functionalities like transparent Linked Data caching, querying, reasoning and versioning and has now been extended to a complete Linked Data Publishing suite that you can use for a number of frequent tasks:

  • Linked Data Publishing of RDF or legacy data
  • Semantic Search over your own data
  • SKOS Thesaurus editing and content interlinking

For this purpose, the LMF Standalone Installation offers a combined and pre-configured installer for LMF Core, Google Refine and Apache Stanbol that simplifies the interaction between these components. Publishing Linked Data is made very easy with our framework.

With its built-in data management tools, we consider the LMF particularly useful for “casual” Linked Data users who want to publish small to medium-sized datasets (up to a few hundred million triples), e.g. in the Open Government or Linked Enterprise area. Another common use case is building small Linked Data applications combining local data with Web data.

Other scenarios (e.g. with custom legacy->RDF converters) can easily be implemented on top of the LMF by building custom projects that build upon the LMF modules. See the documentation on the website to learn how this can be achieved.

List of Major Changes since 2.0

  • Apache Stanbol integration for content enhancement and interlinking
  • Google Refine integration for data management and Linked Data publishing
  • Semantic Search UI Editor for quickly building Semantic Search Interfaces
  • SKOSjs Editor to build SKOS thesauruses (uses SPARQL Query/Update)
  • improved user and security management
  • native SPARQL implementation mapping queries directly to SQL
  • improved performance for big datasets (imports, querying)
  • integrated book demo to show Semantic Search configuration

LMF Demos (including some who show the “media” aspect) can be found at  http://labs.newmedialab.at. Note that this server is still running older versions of the LMF. We will upgrade it to the latest release in the coming week.

I hope you will find our software useful and can spare 10 minutes to try it out!

I’d like to conclude with a testimonial from François-Paul Servant, Renault, whom we presented a pre-release two weeks ago:

“You cannot imagine how happy I’ve been to see such a great and neat demo. You know, I’ve been a long time believer in SW, but I was beginning to give up hope on getting well polished tools – useful things that work and look good. This demo changed my mind. Thanks! I can’t wait to have LMF installed on my machine and use it!”