Open Anzo is the third disk-based triplestore that I managed to set up, load with a few files of RDF data, and query with SPARQL. Its home page describes it as “an open source enterprise-featured RDF store and service oriented middleware platform that provides support for multiple users, distributed clients, offline work, real-time notification, named-graph modularization, versioning, access controls, and transactions with preconditions”.

Just about all the RDF triplestores I’ve been trying were designed from the ground up to store RDF triples. OpenLink Software’s Virtuoso is a database server that can also store (and, as part of its original specialty, serve as an efficient interface to databases of) relational data and XML, so some of my setup and usage steps required learning a few other aspects of it first. For example, the actual loading of RDF is done using Virtuoso’s WebDAV support, so I had to learn a…

My efforts to set up and try RDF triplestores have been a bit frustrating. I won’t go into reasons here, because several of the efforts are on hold for now, but my attempts to set up and use Sesame went so quickly and easily that I wanted to write it up right away.

I recently realized that most of my experience with RDF has been with tools that load triples into memory and then work with them there, so I’ve decided to get to know the disk-based triplestores out there better: Jena, Joseki, Sesame, AllegroGraph, OpenLink, Mulgara… let me know if I’m missing anything here.