Thea-VBA

A Visual-Basic for Applications Semantic Web library

 

Overview

Thea-VBA is a Visual Basic for Applications library for accessing, parsing, viewing and manipulating Semantic Web content (RDF and OWL) from desktop applications that support VBA, namely Microsoft Office applications, and more specifically MS Excel.

There are many tools and libraries that support the W3C’s core Semantic Web specifications; mostly RDF and, to a lesser extend, OWL. The majority of these tools[1] are Java-based and there are also implementations for scripting languages[2]. To our knowledge there are no any VBA tools or libraries that support either RDF or OWL.

The objective of Thea-VBA is to make RDF and OWL content available to users of popular desktop applications (mostly MS-Excel) both at end-user and at macro/script developer level. The aim is to facilitate the adoption of Semantic Web by providing access to RDF and OWL data to a wider audience.

 

Architecture

At its current state Thea-VBA consists of a core VBA library for parsing RDF/XML content and results in an internal in-memory storage of RDF triples that can be accessed by an API interface. Thea-VBA parser is using MSXML2 parser. On top of the core VBA library there is a set of VBA macros for accessing RDF files or URIs and presenting the resulting RDF triples in MS-Excel’s UI.

 

Features

o       RDF Parser

o       Native MS-Excel interface to access RDF/XML URLs and present RDF data models.

·        Planned

o       OWL parser

o       OWL Reasoner

o       Improved UI (support for OWL constructs)

o       Convert Relational DBMS data to OWL models.

o       OWL Ontology merging and aligning

 

License

          Thea-VBA is available under GNU General Public License (GPL)

 

Downloads

          Thea-VBA is a SemanticWeb.gr project and it is hosted at SourceForge. 

 You can download from the project page at SourceForge

          Requirements: MS-Windows with MS-Office and MSXML2

 

Documentation

          Thea-VBA download package contains documentation for the core VBA parser API and the example Excel macros

on how to use the API.

 

Version history

          0.1 Initial release 2002 as VB6 class. Support for earlier RDF recommendation.

          0.2 Release May 2005, Port to VBA, convert to RDF/XML revised recommendation

          0.3 July 2005. Full support of RDF/XML and datatypes. Native MS-Excel UI.

         

 

Support – Contact information

          Thea-VBA is a SemanticWeb.gr project. Please send all questions, comments and suggestions to vangelis@semanticweb.gr

         

Related Links

            [1] RDF Tools for developers

            [2] For a survey : http://www.semanticscripting.org