This book is primarily intended to be a practical guide for using RDF data in infor-
mation processing, linked data, and semantic web applications using the Common
Lisp APIs for the AllegroGraph product. A second use for this book is to help you,
the reader, set up an interactive Lisp development environment for writing knowledge
intensive applications. So, while the Semantic Web applications using the Allegro-
Graph RDF data store is the main theme in this book, I will also cover using data
from a variety of sources like Freebase, DBpedia and other public RDF repositories,
use of statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the GeoNames database
and public web service.1
1. Getting started
I expect you to install the Franz Free Edition Common Lisp environment with the
Free Edition of AllegroGraph to work through the examples in this book. If you own
professional or enterprise licenses for these projects you can use that also. The free
editions have restrictions on their use so read the license agreement.
Download the Free Lisp Edition and then install AllegroGraph using:
(require :update)
(system.update:install-allegrograph)
Whenever you start Lisp using evaluate the following form to load AllegroGraph:
(require :agraph)
I do not duplicate information in this book that appears in the documentation available
on the Franz web site. I urge you to read how to set up an Emacs development
environment.
1The geonames.org web service is limited to 2000 queries per hour from any single IP address. Commercial support is available, or, with some effort, you can also run GeoNames on your own server.
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