Programming the Semantic Web

Chapter 8. Overview of Toolkits

By now you have absorbed plenty of theory and practice, you understand the basics of semantic web standards, and you’re totally convinced that you need to build your next big application using semantics. Right? So now it’s time to learn about industrial-strength toolkits that you can use to power a web- or client-server application.

A number of good graph-store solutions have emerged since developers first started building semantic web technologies. In this chapter we’ll provide an overview of several open source and commercial offerings, but we’ll primarily be looking at Sesame, which is one of the leading graph stores and is considered to have excellent performance. We’ll first look at the Sesame APIs, then we’ll work through the complete process of installing a Java Web Server (if you don’t already have Jetty or Tomcat set up), installing Sesame, using the workbench, and adding data. We’ve also provided a small Python module that allows you to query Sesame directly from Python, and you’ll see how to create a simple application that queries and updates the Sesame store.

Finally, we’ll look at some of the widgets from the MIT SIMILE project, such as Exhibit and Timeline, which are designed to make the exploration and visualization of semantic data easy. You’ll learn how to hook the widgets directly to the Sesame server and build web applications that allow users to search and visualize data in the graph without any server-side programming.

Sesame

Sesame ...