Leveraging existing Web frameworks for a SIOC explorer to.pdfVIP

Leveraging existing Web frameworks for a SIOC explorer to browse online social communities Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren Digital Enterprise Research Institute National University of Ireland, Galway Galway, Ireland Abstract. Since online Semantic Web applications are based on existing Web infrastructure, developing these applications could leverage experi- ences with and infrastructure of existing frameworks. These frameworks need to be extended to deal with the different nature of Semantic Web data. We introduce several extensions to the Ruby on Rails Web devel- opment framework to support Semantic Web application development, and demonstrate them by developing a SIOC explorer. This online appli- cation integrates information from heterogeneous communities, allowing users to explore this information and find relevant posts and topics across these sites without the need to manually visit the different sites. 1 Introduction Today’s World Wide Web is undergoing a transition towards tomorrow’s Seman- tic Web. Applications on the Semantic Web can provide benefits to their users by integrating data from many different sources. One challenge that developers encounter is the lack of support for developing such Semantic Web applications, compared to the many frameworks that exist for creating “ordinary” Web ap- plications. One option for developers, is to implement the Semantic Web elements of their application manually and to use an existing Web application framework for creating the Web interface. But as we will explain, this option is not optimal given the fundamental differences between Semantic Web data and traditional relational data, restricting the parts of the framework that can be reused. Inste