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.

My old friend Dale Waldt (I remember, immediately after the announcement of the existence of XML at SGML 1996, going up to my then-coworker Dale and asking “So what do we think?”) recently posted an entry on the Gilbane XML blog titled Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult. A few days ago I posted a comment saying that the things that he saw as missing from semantic technologies are actually already there and working well, but my reply hasn’t shown up yet, so after a…

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.

Although he doesn’t describe it in linked data terms, a recent posting from Dean Allemang has some great suggestions for how to dive into a set of SPARQL-accessible data you know nothing about in order to find out what’s there. If there’s cool stuff in the data set, this is a lot of fun. (Also check out the recent Talking with Talis with Dean, where he describes many examples of semantic web technology helping large organizations solve very real problems.)