| Abstract |
Semantic Web applications share a large portion of development
effort with database-driven Web applications. Existing approaches
for development of these database-driven applications cannot be
directly applied to Semantic Web data due to differences in the
underlying data model. We develop a mapping approach that embeds
Semantic Web data into object-oriented languages and thereby enables
reuse of existing Web application frameworks.
We analyse the relation between the Semantic Web and the Web, and
survey the typical data access patterns in Semantic Web
applications. We discuss the mismatch between object-oriented
programming languages and Semantic Web data, for example in the
semantics of class membership, inheritance relations, and object
conformance to schemas.
We present ActiveRDF, an object-oriented API for managing RDF data
that offers full manipulation and querying of RDF data, does not
rely on a schema and fully conforms to RDF(S) semantics. ActiveRDF
can be used with different RDF data stores: adapters have been
implemented to generic SPARQL endpoints, Sesame, Jena, Redland and
YARS and new adapters can be added easily. We demonstrate the usage
of ActiveRDF and its integration with the popular Ruby on Rails
framework which enables rapid development of Semantic Web
applications. |