Semi-automatic Generation of an Object-Oriented API Framework over Semantic Repositories

Abstract

This paper presents a system able to generate an abstraction framework over a RDF-based, semantic triplestore, offering Object-Oriented Application Programming Interfaces to be made available for external applications. The system only requires a well-defined RDF schema and a minimal supervision by the user, and is able to produce all of the components of the API framework at their different layers, ranging from data source classes up to higher-level modules in terms of web service interfaces, in order to provide CRUD operations over the underlying semantic data. The system is sufficiently generic to accept any RDF repository with its schema as input, and can be easily configured to fine-tune the automatic generation of the API components to suit the needs of specific applications. The system has been deployed and tested on top of a large semantic repository featuring a schema where multiple real-world conceptualizations are defined, including one representing a learning model specifically designed for advanced e-learning management platforms.