ReleaseNotes
============

Jena2-pre2 (April 2003)

Second preview release of Jena2.

It is a preview release, not intended for serious development.  Developers
are encouraged to try it out and send feedback to jena-dev@yahoogroups.com.

This release does not support persistence of RDF data whether relational
First release of ontology APIdatabases or BerlekleyDB databases.

For guidance on porting code from Jena 1, see doc/migrating1-2.html

In this release:

RDQL:
+ support for datatypes and language tags on literals based on the
  N-Triples syntax.  e.g. "123"^^xsd:integer
+ all commas in queries are optional
+ qnames do not need to be quoted by <>
+ Standard namespace built-in: rdf:, rdfs:, owl:, xsd:  An application
  may override these with explicit declarations.
+ Uses the SPI-level query mechansism - this is preparation for
  improved performance with relational databases.

N3:
+ support for datatypes and language tags on literals based on
  the N-Triples syntax.  e.g. "123"^^xsd:integer

I/O:
+ Lots of bug fixes.
+ Character encoding bug fixes, see the section
  "Rush Guide - Jena1 Migration (Must Read)"
  in doc/IO/iohowto.html
  Jena2 I/O subsystem uses InputStream's and OutputStream's where
  Jena1 used Reader's and Writer's.
+ There is still a problem under Linux with FileWriter
  and OutputStreamWriter. The test suite prints a warning
  message describing the problem and the workaround.
   "IANA name for Java encoding: ISO-8859-15 is not known. 
    Not including any encoding declaration in the RDF/XML output.
    It is better to use a FileOutputStream, in place of a FileWriter."
+ The RDF/XML Writers now behave more uniformly and can be
  controlled much better.
+ Improved documentation for both basic and advanced I/O in Jena2
  is provided in doc/IO/iohowto.html
+ ARP reflects latest WG decisions, as of 7th April 2003, including
  Last Call issue resolutions:
    williams-01, reagle-01, reagle-02, tbl-01
  Note: bagID is dead.

Reification:
+ new reification API as described on the SourceForge web pages
    (a copy is included in doc/reify-api.html)
+ RDF/XML readers/writers will round-trip reified statements
+ reification statements normally invisible but can be seen for
  WG conformance

Ontology API:
+ first release of the new ontology API, which provides language
  neutral (specfically DAML+OIL, OWL and - soon - RDFS)
  convenience API
+ addresses the limitations of the Jena 1 DAML API though
  RDF resource polymorphism, allowing resources to be viewed via
  different abstract views
+ ontology document manager constructs imports closure of a model
  and allows redirection of imported URL's to locally cached copies
+ computes the transitive closure of the class and property
  hierarchies, as a pre-cursor to supporting flexible reasoner
  plugins for OWL and DAML reasoning.