OWLART Frequently Asked Questions

Q. I see I need to use Maven to build OWLART. I don't know how to use it and, frankly, I don't want to learn a new technology, I just want to use <replace_here_with_your_favourite_IDE>. May I skip this step?

Yes, in theory you can. You can just check all the dependencies written in the pom.xml file of each project, search them on the web, download them (make a prayer hoping you downloaded the exact version of everything, all the required dependencies etc..), then import them in <replace_here_with_your_favourite_IDE>, inside the project that you just created to hold the sources, then import the sources etc...

...though..let us be a bit evangelists...Maven may be a big beast if you start to love it, you get addicted to it, and start thinking things like "I want to prepare a beer with it" (we are sure there is a Maven plugin even for that...), but, if you are an end user of Maven and just need it to build a project, the time you need to download and install it, is so short you will get immediately paid back for the time you would need to build this single project in the traditional way. See the build instructions to see how quick is to build OWLART (and most other projects you will find out there) with Maven.

Last but not the least, Maven is today a de facto standard for releasing source code.

...and..oh, yes, almost probably there is a Maven plugin for <replace_here_with_your_favourite_IDE> !

Q. Why do I need even OWLARTSesame2Impl (or any other implementation) to start using OWLART for doing even simple things?

OWLART is just a set of very high level API. They provide a very minimal implementation of RDF elements, some utilities, and high level calls for RDF vocabularies (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS and SKOSXL) rewritten in terms of the basic triple API. The rest (e.g. the RDF triple oriented API, SPARQL etc..) is just interfaces. Thus OWLART relies on underlying implementations which act as adapters between OWLART interfaces and the chosen RDF middleware / triplestore API.