Before diving into the internals of Sesame, we will start with a short introduction to Sesame by giving a high-level overview of its components. It's important to have some basic knowledge about this as the rest of this document will often refer to various components that are touched upon here. It is assumed that the reader has at least some basic knowledge about RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, etc. If this is not the case, some introductory articles can be found at the following locations:
We will try to explain the Sesame framework using the following figure, which shows the most prominent components and APIs in Sesame and how they are built on top of each other. Each component/API depends on the components/APIs that are beneath them.
All the way at the bottom of the diagram is the RDF Model, the foundation of the Sesame framework. Being an RDF-oriented framework, all parts of Sesame are to some extent dependent on this RDF model, which defines interfaces and implementation for all basic RDF entities: URI, blank node, literal and statement.
Rio, which stands for "RDF I/O", consists of a set of parsers and writers for various RDF file formats. The parsers can be used to translate RDF files to sets of statements, and the writers for the reverse operation. Rio can also be used independent of the rest of Sesame.
The Storage And Inference Layer (Sail) API is a low level System API
(SPI) for RDF stores and inferencers. Its purpose is to abstract from
the storage and inference details, allowing various types of storage and
inference to be used. The Sail API is mainly of interest for those who
are developing Sail implementations, for all others it suffices to know
how to create and configure one. There are several implementations of
the Sail API, for example the MemoryStore which
stores RDF data in main memory, and the
NativeStore which uses dedicated on-disk data
structures for storage.
The Repository API is a higer level API that offers a large number of
developer-oriented methods for handling RDF data. The main goal of this
API is to make the life of application developers as easy as possible.
It offers various methods for uploading data files, querying, and
extracting and manipulating data. There are several implementations of
this API, the ones shown in this figure are the
SailRepository and the
HTTPRepository. The former translates calls to a
Sail implementation of choice, the latter offers transparent
client-server communication with a Sesame server over HTTP.
The top-most component in the diagram is the HTTP Server. The HTTP
Server consists of a number of Java Servlets that implement a protocol
for accessing Sesame repositories over HTTP. The details of this
protocol can be found in Sesame's system documentation, but most people
can simply use a client library to handle the communication. The
HTTPClient that is used by the
HTTPRepository is one such library.
While each part of the Sesame code is publicly available and extensible, most application developers will be primarily interested in the Repository API. This API is described in more detail in one of the following chapters.