A Comparative Analysis of dot NET-Based and Open Source Platforms for Ontologies Development

Abstract

Many studies have evaluated and compared existing open-sources semantic web platforms for ontologies development. However, none of these studies has included the dot NET-based semantic web platforms in the empirical investigations. This study conducts a comparative analysis of open-source and dot NET-based semantic web platforms for ontologies development. Two popular dot NET-based semantic web platforms, namely, SemWeb.NET and dotNetRDF are analyzed and compared against open-source environments including Jena API, Protege and RDF4J also known as Sesame SDK. Various metrics are used to compare the two categories of platforms such as the storage mode, query support, consistency checking, interoperability with other tools, and many more. A number of five ontologies of different sizes are used in the experiments. The experimental results showed that the open-source platforms provides more facilities for creating, storing and processing ontologies compared to the dot NET-based tools. Furthermore, the experiments revealed that Protege and RDF4J open-source and dotNetRDF platforms provide both graphical user interface (GUI) and command line interface for ontologies processing, whereas, Jena open-source and SemWeb.NET are command line platforms. Moreover, the results showed that the open-source platforms are capable of processing multiple ontologies' files formats including RDF and OWL formats, whereas, the dot NET-based tools only process RDF ontologies. Finally, the experiments enabled to learn that the dot NET-based platforms have limited memories size as they failed to load and query larges ontologies compared to open-source environments.