nl.aidministrator.rdf.sail.model

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Package nl.aidministrator.rdf.sail.model

RDF Storage And Inference Layer.

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Description

Interface Summary

Value The interface for all RDF model values.

Class Summary

Intersection An intersection of classes.

Literal An RDF literal consisting of a label (the value) and an optional language code for this label.

Resource An RDF resource that can represent both URIs and anonymous nodes.

Statement An RDF statement.

Package nl.aidministrator.rdf.sail.model Description

RDF Storage And Inference Layer.

The RDF Storage And Inference Layer (RDF Sail) is a collection of interfaces defining an API for RDF repositories. RDF Sail has been designed with the following aims in mind:

The API must define a minimal interface for storing RDF in, and extracting and deleting RDF from (persistent) repositories.
The API must abstract from the actual storage mechanism -- be they databases, in-memory (volatile) data structures, files or something else.
The API should be as scalable as possible.
The API should be extendable to other RDF-based languages like DAML+OIL.
The API should support both read-only and read-write repositories properly. A projected use of the read-only interface is for opening up existing databases to the Semantic Web.

The API is split up in several interfaces defining methods for read-only and read-write repositories, as well as methods for RDF-only and RDF Schema repositories. The interfaces are organized like this:

            Sail
              |
              |
          RdfSource
            /   \
           /     \
RdfRepository   RdfSchemaSource
           \     /
            \   /
     RdfSchemaRepository

To accomodate for the scalability, RDF Sail heavily relies on iterators for returning values from the repositories. Iterators exist for returning namespaces, statements, values (literals and resources) and resources.

All methods in the RDF Sail API can throw SailInternalException's (a RuntimeException) to indicate an error or an unexpected situation in the RDF Sail internally (e.g. the database to connect to does not exist).