A Comparative Study of RDF and Topic Maps Development Tools and APIs

Abstract

Users’ freedom resulted into the exponential growth of the World Wide Web containing billions of web pages but aggravated the problem of finding specific information precisely. Semantic Web technology is deemed as solution to the problem by annotating web resources with metadata. To realize the idea of Semantic Web, several technologies are invented in the past several years. Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps are the two prominent technologies developed for turning the vision of Semantic Web into reality by facilitating knowledge integration and sharing. Both RDF and Topic Maps provides constructs to enrich web contents with semantic information to make them useful for both humans and machines. However, RDF and Topic Maps differs and suffers from the interoperability problem due to difference in their fundamental architectures, approaches, techniques, and owner organizations and might result into two separate islands on the Web of future. To facilitate developers in understanding the technologies and accelerate their development process to produce valuable applications, a number of tools are invented by the researchers, academia, and organizations for both RDF and Topic Maps. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the tools by investigating, analysing, classifying, and comparing them using a set of parameters. The available tools are broadly classified into three categories: storage, editing, and visualization, and their interoperability problem is addressed. We hope that this paper will provide a compact platform for both researchers and users to help them in selecting tools rich enough to satisfy their needs effectively.