Semantic Web Programming

Part III. Building Semantic Web Applications

This section deals with the second major aspect; integrating the knowledgebase with an application that acts upon it. Most Semantic Web applications are built using the same fundamental principles, similar components, and variations of a basic architecture. This section builds on the foundation established so far by using the components and technologies already presented to perform tasks that are common to Semantic Web applications like integrating a knowledge model into an application, exposing data as RDF, integrating the disparate knowledge models, and sharing semantic information with the world. Each chapter explores one of these common tasks, providing numerous examples along the way. Additionally, each chapter in this section incrementally develops a large scale Semantic Web reference application called the FriendTracker to clearly illustrate the programming aspects.

Chapter 8 takes the first step towards building a Semantic Web application by presenting the integration and interactions of a Semantic Web framework and traditional applications. The chapter provides an extensive look at the complete life cycle of a Semantic Web application. Next, it presents the common frameworks and provides a complete overview of the Jena Semantic Web framework using programming examples. Finally, the chapter presents many common programming challenges and solutions such as customization and configuration, status reporting, and concurrency as they ...