RDF Textual Encoding Framework

RDFTEF is an open source Java framework that supports textual encoding in RDF+OWL. It provides a shell that allows the model to be queried using SPARQL, is able to import existing encoded text in XML TEI format, and can save the model to RDF/XML or export it in form of aspect slices, as XML TEI format.

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative , and its Guidelines are an international and interdisciplinary standard that facilitates libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent a variety of literary and linguistic texts for online research, teaching, and preservation .

However, TEI is XML based, and thus it suffers heavy limitations, such as overlapping annotations. RDF is able to overcome this, using ontology vocabularies and allowing powerful queries.

Motivation

There are reasons to believe that it would be very interesting to use Semantic Web tools and languages like RDF and OWL for tasks traditionally performed with XML mark-up. Among these, is textual encoding of literary documents and or manuscripts. (see this explorative paper, ELPUB2005). While the idea of using RDF might be very fascinating indeed, there is a huge amount of previous work and legacy standards that would simply make a standardization effort not realistic at the moment. With this project, however, the aim is to allow researcher and interested individuals to experience the the idea, features and possibilities of RDF textual encoding.

Acknowledgement

This project was developed with the mentoring of SEMEDIA Group and supported by Google's Summer of Code (SoC) program. Check the initial proposal project. Other projects proposed by SEMEDIA to Summer of Code are at it's Project Proposal Page.

Status

RDFTEF is currently alpha software, so portions of the system are incomplete or missing. Feature requests, complaints, bug reports and general comments are welcomed.

RDFTEF is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Features

RDFTEF currently supports importing and exporting of XML files in a subset of the TEI format. Thus not all tags described at TEI guidelines are managed. A list of the supported tags is provided with the software package (see Download).

The query interface allows queries to be entered in SPARQL Language. Some additional functions are provided so as to allow more interesting and powerful queries. Look at the README file in the software package.

Requirements

RDFTEF needs the lastest CVS version of Jena2 and ARQ. Working versions of both are provided with RDFTEF, in the lib/ directory. The other packages in lib/ are required by Jena and ARQ.

RDFTEF was developed and tested with Java JDK 1.5. It was not tested with JDK 1.4, though it might work well with it.

Download

Download the last version from the project's CVS.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rdftef login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rdftef co -P RDFTEF2

For more details on how to do this see SourceForge instructions.

Also, take a look at the project's summary page, here at SourceForge.

Documentation

See the RDFTEF documentation for setup instructions and usage details and examples.

Thanks

Thank you Giovanni and Christian at SEMEDIA, and Chris, Natalie & co. at Google!

Fabio N. Kepler (fabio DOT kepler AT gmail DOT com)

This project was developed with the mentoring and based on ongoing research of Semedia Group, from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, Italy.

This project was supported and funded by Google's Summer of Code Open Source initiative.