Semantic Web Application Architecture

Semantic Web Application Architecture

How to use Semantic Web in your application?

Main tools:

• RDF parsers, serializers and converters
• RDF Store (sometimes called ‘‘Triple Store’’)
• RDF Query Engine

Parsers & Serializers

Parser

• RDF can be in XML/RDF or Turtle format
• Parser converts in into an RDF graph

Serializer

• does the opposite: from a graph it creates a serialized version of it

RDF Converters

Sometimes the data source is not in RDF form

• e.g. relational databases, spreadsheets
• but also can be microformats - special attributes in HTML tags (business cards or events)
• or RDFa - same idea, embed RDF into HTML attributes
  • to have machine-processable HTML data

RDF Store

This is a database

• tuned for storing and retrieving triples
• also should have an ability to merge information from multiple data sources (unlike Relational Databases)

RDF Query Engine

Closely related to #RDF Store

• SPARQL: runs structured queries on the store to retrieve data
• SPARQL is not only a query language, but also a protocol
• so a query engine can be a web service

Libraries

• Sesame [http://openrdf.org] - RDF Store and QE
• SimpleNLG [https://code.google.com/p/simplenlg/] - translates RDF statements into English
  • NLG - Natural Language Generation

Sources

• Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist (book)
• Web Data Management, Manolescu, Ioana, et al. [http://webdam.inria.fr/Jorge/]