Federated Rdf Repositories for Integrated Hybrid Museums

(EN) The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a standard for the semantic web that allows describing web resources by means of metadata, providing " interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the web ". Using RDF to describe resources in a distributed environment like the web or a grid needs a framework to enable distributed RDF specifications. On the one hand such specifications require mechanisms that allow the access to interrelated semantic information about resources no matter where this information is stored. In this way, this framework would avoid semantic islands creation by providing navigational support to reach in a transparent way remote metadata resources specified in a RDF model. On the other hand, it is likely that distributed RDF specifications are owned by different organizations or stakeholders which may store their RDF models in heterogeneous repositories. Thus, a framework providing the communicating layer that allows interoperability between several kinds of RDF repositories by means of a RDF models federation is also a requirement. In this paper, we present a federation architecture for distributed RDF models supporting the two requirements listed above: transparent navigation irrespective of the locations where resources are stored and support for heterogeneous repositories. Firstly, we discuss a particular RDF repository that has been used to prove the feasibility of our approach and the correctness of our federation architecture design. Secondly, we show the advantages of using the .NET technology to implement a framework requiring integration and interoperability between heterogeneous components. Next, we discuss the communicating technology that has been used in order to guarantee remote access between distributed repositories and finally, we present the RDF models federation architecture, including the management of federation members and the distribution mechanism to establish links between remote RDF models that can be navigated transparently. The proposed models and implementation is the core persistence layer for a Hybrid Museum project known as MoMo.