Passerelle – a plug - in that connects Protégé to Sesame

Introduction Passerelle is a plug-in developed for Protégé to support Sesame. It provides Protégé users with the possibility to connect their ontologies with Sesame architecture in order to store and query resource description framework (RDF) data from Protégé [1]. We have identified a lack of a strong query language in the previous versions of Protégé (versions preceding Protégé 3.0), which we suppose is the main reason that has attracted a large number of people to use Protégé together with Sesame. Sesame is a web-based architecture which facilitates storage of RDF Query Language (RQL) data and schema information. A Database Management System (DBMS) is needed to keep Sesame independent of any particular database. Sesame uses a Repository Abstraction Layer (RAL), where all the DBMS code is saved. RAL offers a resource description framework specific method to the client, so that it can call a specific DBMS. Sesame supports many different ways of communication. It is possible to communicate over HTTP while using the web environment and also by using Remote Method Invocation (RMI), or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) [2]. The concept of a strong query language within Protégé by connecting with Sesame, led to the idea of developing a plug-in which could bridge the gap between the entities. Problems such as usage of incompatible namespaces between the two entities and manual configurations of namespaces to connect the two entities strengthened our idea and led to the development of Passerelle. This rest of the paper is organized as follows. Description of Passerelle is provided and after that we describe the ontology that uses Passerelle. The paper finally present concluding remarks together with future research directions.