Architecture for Including Personalization in a Mobile GIS via Semantic Web Techniques - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 217

Frameworks

In order to use semantic data in an application, it is necessary to deploy the
Semantic Web concepts described previously in an application. To this end
RDF frameworks have been introduced. These frameworks provide facilities
to build Semantic Web applications that use ontologies and reasoners.
To fi lter out all the existing frameworks, we focus on those which have
the generic tools necessary to develop a Semantic Web system and they
provide: 1) support for RDF and OWL languages, 2) support for SPARQL
specifi cation, 3) tools to store RDF data with the ability to scale to large
datasets, and 4) inference capabilities for ontologies.

Desktop Frameworks

Two frameworks that accomplish these requirements and are well-
established for the Semantic Web community are Jena (Carroll et al. 2004)
and OpenRDF Sesame (Aduna 2012) .
Jena is an open-source Java framework that provides a programmatic
environment for RDF, OWL and SPARQL languages and offers support
for several reasoners. Regarding storage systems, it offers two different
persistent modules: SDB and TDB. SDB stores information in a transactional
database, using JDBC interface to access the most well-known databases;
and TDB stores the information in a pure-Java dataset that offers
non-transactional functionality.
OpenRDF Sesame is an extensible Java framework and web server for
RDF parsing, storage and SPARQL querying. Sesame has a memory-based
and a disk-based RDF store and RDF inferences. The framework is fully
extensible and confi gurable regarding storage mechanisms, inferences and
query languages.

Spatial Reasoning

Therefore, both frameworks, Jena and OpenRDF Sesame, have support
for RDF/OWL languages, offer query engines for RDF data and provide
inference functionalities. But, do they support to deal with RDF spatial
data?
Similar to relational databases that have extensions to work with spatial
data, 2 Semantic Web frameworks have extensions to work with RDF spatial
data. Thus, Jena can use GeospatialWeb (KONA 2010) as spatial extension

For example, PostGIS spatial database provides spatial objects for storing and querying
geographic information in PostgreSQL database.

2