Everyday Tools for the Semantic Web Developer

Rob Vesservesse@dotnetrdf.org

Cray Inc

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 2

About Me• Software Engineer at Cray• Writing up my PhD Thesis in spare time– “Link Integrity for the Semantic Web”

• Run the dotNetRDF Project– Started January 2009– Latest Releases

• 0.5.1 Beta (APIs)• 0.4.0 Beta (Toolkit)

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 3

My Life as a Semantic Web Developer• Constantly working with different data

sources, formats, vocabularies etc.• Was frustrated by limited tooling around

conversion, query prototyping and editing– Especially the *nix/Java bias of available tooling

• Seemed pointless to keep writing tiny Java/.Net programs to do everyday tasks

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 4

Tools• All free to use/open source– All of which I’ve used at one stage or another– Some of which I use on a daily basis

• Demos– Going to demo my favourite tool in each category– Slides have links to other useful tools and will be

available on SlideShare

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 5

Data Conversion - rapper• Part of the Redland family of tooling by Dave

Beckett– http://librdf.org/raptor/rapper.html

• *nix based – needs cygwin on Windows• Example Usage:– rapper –g –o turtle input.rdf > output.ttl

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 6

Editing - rdfEditor• Part of the dotNetRDF Toolkit– http://

www.dotnetrdf.org/content.asp?pageID=rdfEditor• Windows only – Mono does not support the

required APIs unfortunately• Notepad replacement for RDF editing with syntax

highlighting, auto-complete and validation capabilities

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 7

Query Prototyping - Fuseki• Part of the family of Jena Tooling– http://openjena.org/wiki/Fuseki

• Provides a HTTP server for SPARQL Query and Update runnable from the command line

• Can use persistent TDB storage (Jena’s native triple store)

• Example Usage:– java –jar fuseki-sys.jar --update --loc=DB

12/6/2011

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 8

Management - Store Manager• Part of the dotNetRDF Toolkit– http://

www.dotnetrdf.org/content.asp?pageID=Store%20Manager

• .Net Based – needs Mono on *nix• GUI for working with a variety of Triple Stores

through a standard interface

12/6/2011

Questions?

rvesse@dotnetrdf.orgTwitter: @RobVesse

http://www.dotnetrdf.org 10

Other Recommended Tools• Conversion– riot (Jena ARQ)

• Query Prototyping– SparqlGUI (dotNetRDF Toolkit)– Twinkle (by Leigh Dodds)

• Management– Sesame Windows Client

12/6/2011