Introduction
Swish - which stands for Semantic Web Inference Scripting in Haskell -
was written by Graham Klyne as a framework, written in the purely
functional programming language Haskell, for performing deductions in
RDF data using a variety of techniques. Swish was conceived as a
toolkit for experimenting with RDF inference, and for implementing
stand-alone RDF file processors (usable in similar style to CWM, but
with a view to being extensible in declarative style through added
Haskell function and data value declarations). One of the aims was to
explore Haskell as “a scripting language for the Semantic
Web”.
It was updated from version 0.2.1 by Vasili I Galchin so that it would
build with the current version of GHC, and
released on Hackage.
Since then it has been updated to take advantage of recent
developments in the Haskell ecosystem, add support for the NTriples
and Turtle serialisation formats, and a number of convenience
functions. Development is done on GitLab at https://gitlab.com/dburke/swish
and the previous bitbucket site
is now outdated (you may also find a version on GitHub which should
also be ignored).
I attempt to keep Swish buildable on recent GHC versions but it is done
on a best-effort basis, so support for “older” versions of GHC is not
guaranteed.
Aim
Current development is based on my own needs, which are more about
using this as a RDF library for I/O with limited querying rather than
for inferencing or use as a flexible graph-processing library
(e.g. for extensions to non-RDF models).
Copyright
(c) 2003, 2004 G. Klyne
(c) 2009 Vasili I Galchin
(c) 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019,
2020 Doug Burke
All rights reserved.
License
LGPL V2.1
Haskell and the Semantic Web
Other Haskell packages for RDF support include
Installation
The following commands will install a command-line tool Swish
along
with the modules in the Swish
namespace; documentation can be found
on Hackage.
With cabal
Install a recent version of the Haskell
platform and then try
% cabal update
% cabal install swish
With stack
Swish is available as part of the stackage curated package set.
There are several stack configuration files, for different GHC
versions:
% cd swish
% stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-8.8.yaml stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-8.6.yaml stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-8.4.yaml stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-8.2.yaml stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-8.0.yaml stack install
% STACK_YAML=stack-7.10.yaml stack install
With nix
There is now support for building with the nix
package manager:
% nix-shell
...
nix-shell% cabal test
At the time of writing this uses GHC 8.8.2, but you can switch compiler
% nix-shell --argstr compiler ghc865