Programming the Semantic Web

Chapter 10. Tying It All Together

We would definitely fall short of our goal of creating a practical guide to using semantic data if we didn’t actually tie it all together in the end. The purpose of this chapter is to take many of the ideas, lessons, and technologies that we’ve covered so far and use them to build a complete application. In doing this, we hope to put into practice the patterns we showed you in the previous chapter, and also to really make clear the advantages of using semantics to represent your data.

Much of the commercial activity (i.e., where people are making money) in semantic web technologies is in building flexible content management systems that work within large companies or that allow for easy data partnerships between groups or companies. Among other things, this chapter should serve as a recipe for building such a system, which we’ll do by building an example application.

A Job Listing Application

The focus of our example application is a job listing site for American companies, which will tie together many different kinds of data to show how semantic data makes extensibility and sophisticated searches much easier. Hopefully you’ll be able to use this as a guide to building any application based on semantic data.

There are many steps to building this application:

1. Loading an initial dataset into Sesame

2. Setting up a web application server

3. Creating HTML templates for viewing objects

4. Expanding the dataset from public sources

5. Republishing the data for other semantic ...