RDF application building and databinding tools

[Steven Perry]

There are a number of RDF tools and frameworks that we use in DiGIR2 and
other projects here at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Research
Center.  I will include a brief description of each as well as a link to
more information.

Jena:
A Java framework for working with RDF that includes
serialization/deserialization of N3, N-Triple, RDF/XML, RDF/XML-ABBREV,
and others, both memory and DB-backed triple stores, a reasoner API,
support for reification, typed literals, and support for a variety of
query languages including RDQL and SPARQL.  Jena is an open source
project that is used as a component of many other semantic web
projects.  It is developed by HP Labs.
http://jena.sourceforge.net

Redland:
A C based RDF framework with bindings for many different languages
including Perl, Java, C#, Ruby, and others. It also includes
serialization/deserialization from a variety of formats, memory and
DB-backed triple stores, support for SPARQL and Rasqal query languages,
etc.  Redland is an open source project that is used as a component of
many other semantic web projects.  It is developed by Dave Beckett at
the University of Bristol.
http://librdf.org

Jastor:
A Java code generator that emits Java Beans from OWL ontologies.  Think
of it as Castor for OWL.  It is designed to work with Jena and is
developed by Ben Szekely (who also worked on the LSID framework) and Joe
Betz at IBM.
http://jastor.sourceforge.net/

W3C RDF Validator:
Given an RDF/XML document, this web application validates it and
displays it as triples, RDF/XML, or as a graph in a variety of formats
including PNG, SVG, and isaViz.
http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/

Protégé Ontology Editor:
We mostly use text editors for developing ontologies because we've
occasionally found Protege to be unstable with large complicated OWL
models.  However, many people like Protege (a Java desktop application)
which was developed by Standford's Medical Informatics group.
http://protege.stanford.edu

There are also a variety of triple store implementations as well as
other frameworks like Kowari.  However, we can't recommend them because
we either haven't used them or didn't like them.


-Steve


Ricardo Scachetti Pereira wrote:

> Bob Morris wrote:
>
>> OK. I understand. Now I need to know on which Wiki people are
>> developing discussion of the RDF tools. I'm aware only of ontology
>> development tools, and I need to educate myself about where are the
>> tools and frameworks for building applications and for databinding.
>
>
>    Bob,
>
>    I've sent this a couple of months ago to the list, but it might
> still be useful:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/Tutorials
>
>    Click on "Tools" link and it will take to the bottom of the page
> (direct link: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/Tutorials#tools).
> There's a list of RDF tools in there (Jena, Kowari, SOFA, PHP RDF and
> others). I didn't read that material myself, so I'm not sure whether you
> will find what you want. Let us know if you find anything useful.
>    Best regards,
>
> Ricardo