Re: Lightweight RDF/OWL library for Java?

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Oliver Ruebenacker <curoli@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Mostly we are looking for a small library (code). Small API is a
> plus (and tends to come with small code anyway).

Looks like this has been discussed at stack overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/73445/what-are-some-good-java-rdf-libraries

One suggestion there that seems to be in line with what you want is
JRDF (http://jrdf.sourceforge.net)

>  Strongly preferred is a library that works with JDOM, because our
> project already uses that.
>
>  Jena is very powerful and very large. I think with all supporting
> libraries it adds up to something like 10MB, if I remember correctly.

Is this a dependency management issue? I generally use maven to track
dependencies for me, I just have the one entry in for Jena. 10 MB
isn't that big anymore, in the grand scheme of things. The Stack
Overflow post has some discussion on how to cut down on the included
jars.

> Part of its complexity is comes from its layered structure. Main
> classes of the API such as Resource, Statement and Model wrap around
> other classes (Node, Triple and Graph).

For me, that's been a benefit of using Jena, I can work at the level
of abstraction that I need, and ignore the stuff at the lower level.

> A Resource links to a Model
> which can be convenient but also very confusing if you have multiple
> models, so I could gladly do without that.

Almost all APIs support multiple models and/or graphs (depending on
the API under discussion). Most of my use cases call for multiple
models, so I'd end up shying away from an API that did away with that.
:-)

Jim
-- 
Jim McCusker
Programmer Analyst
Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics
Yale School of Medicine
james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330
http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu

PhD Student
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
mccusj@cs.rpi.edu
http://tw.rpi.edu

Received on Monday, 2 May 2011 21:03:42 UTC