SesameTM: Building Topic Maps on RDF

Abstract

Over the past decade RDF has developed to become the dominant standard for representation and interchange of structured data on the web. In portal development, widely unrecognized by Semantic Web research, subject-centric topic maps are actively used and have evolved from an ancient SGML and intermittent XML-based standard to a pure data model. This data model can be represented as a graph and served various integration strategies, put forward over the past years, as a starting point. However, none of these strategies really appreciates the way in which the technologies are used resulting in a poor tool interoperability. To overcome this state we propose a Topic Maps engine acting as congurable wrapper for Sesame. The software library we develop and describe in this paper implements the Topic Maps Application Programming Interface (TMAPI) enabling the usage of Topic Maps infrastructure instead of working at the level of RDF triples.