[arch-magazine] What's That Package -- for May 2010

[Jared Henley]

Hi

Here's my first installment of "What's That Package".  I did have to
choose a package implementing a technology I know nothing at all about
(raptor), but never shying away from a challenge I had a go anyway.

Jared (multixrulz)

=What's That Package?=

All us Archers have packages installed that we don't know the least
thing about.  It's time to know what's there.

==jasper==
Description : A software-based implementation of the codec specified
in the emerging JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard

Website: http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper/

JasPer implements part 1 of the JPEG 2000 standard.  JPEG 2000 is a new
image compression scheme that uses wavelets to compress images.  Part 1
(and presumably all) of the specification is covered by patents, but is
free of royalties and license fees (phew!).  Other parts of the
standard add other features.  Part 5 is the reference software, and
JasPer is one of these.

JPEG 2000 is better than the original JPEG in many ways.  For example,
the first part of a JPEG 2000 file contains a lossy image, and as more
data is read, the image can be progressively sharpened.  JPEG 2000's
lossiness is also nicer, appearing as blurring rather than the
blockiness we all know from JPEG.

==raptor==

Description : A C library that parses RDF/XML/N-Triples into RDF
triples

Website: http://librdf.org/raptor

Raptor parses a variety of data formats into RDF triples.  From
wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework):

One way to represent the notion "The sky has the color blue" in RDF is
as the triple: a subject denoting "the sky", a predicate denoting "has
the color", and an object denoting "blue".

Raptor is required by and closely associated with the redland package,
which in turn is required by openoffice-base.  Redland also requires a
variety of database packages (db, postgresql-libs, libmysqlclient
and sqlite), which hints at the type of work raptor does.