The ICS-FORTH RDFSuite

Description

The ICS-FORTH RDFSuite: High-level Scalable Tools for the Semantic Web

Overview

In the next evolution step of the Web, termed the Semantic Web , vast amounts of information resources (i.e., data, documents, programs) will be made available along with various kinds of descriptive information, i.e., metadata. Better knowledge about the meaning, usage, accessibility or quality-validity of web resources will considerably facilitate automated processing of available Web content/services. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) enables the creation and exchange of resource metadata as any other Web data. To interpret metadata within or across user communities, RDF allows the definition of appropriate schema vocabularies ( RDFS ).

Managing voluminous RDF description bases and schemas with existing low-level APIs and file-based implementations does not ensure fast deployment and easy maintenance of real-scale Semantic Web applications such as Knowledge Portals and E- Marketplaces . Still, we want to benefit from database technology in order to support declarative access and logical and physical RDF data independence. In this way, Semantic Web applications have to specify in a high-level language only which resources need to be accessed, leaving the task of determining how to efficiently store or access their descriptions to the underlying RDF Store. ICS-FORTH R&D activities focus on high-level and scalable software tools enabling the realization of the full potential of the Semantic Web:

The Validating RDF Parser (VRP) : The First RDF Parser supporting semantic validation of both resource descriptions and schemas

The RDF Schema Specific DataBase (RSSDB) : The First RDF Store using schema knowledge to automatically generate an Object-Relational (SQL3) representation of RDF metadata and load resource descriptions.

The RDF Query Language (RQL) : The First Declarative Language for uniformly querying RDF schemas and resource descriptions.

The RDF Update Language (RUL) : ...

Original URL

http://athena.ics.forth.gr:9090/RDF/

http://athena.ics.forth.gr:9090/RDF/