A semi-automatic system to evaluate the performance and scalability of ontology persistent APIs

Abstract

The international Semantic Web community has produced several tools, known as API – application programming interfaces, to help development teams to create applications using semantic technologies. One important family of tools developed to date is related to the manipulation of instances in ontology-based applications. There are two main approaches for manipulating ontology instances in currently developed APIs: (a) using RDF (resource description framework) triples or (b) using classes in object-oriented programming (OOP). In APIs based on RDF triples the development teams need to understand how ontology works in the RDF layers in order to manipulate data for each triple in the application code. Such an approach is highly desired to develop clean applications based strongly on Semantic Web Technologies. Nevertheless, it requires development teams to change their programming paradigm and master those technologies. In APIs based on OOP developers can manipulate data at object level in order to make application development simple and flexible using the conventional programming paradigm. Because of that, several developers have shifted from RDF triples to OOP. Although several tools have been developed to manipulate ontologies at object level, many have not been adequately evaluated for performance and scalability. In effect, there is an urgent demand for effective research results regarding metrics and systems to evaluate the performance and scalability of ontology persistent APIs. As a result, these systems should facilitate the evaluation of persistent APIs to developers. This study thus aims to provide a system for developers to evaluate ontology persistent APIs at object level. In order to validate the feasibility of our system, we have conducted an experiment by considering two solutions used by community of ontology persistence. • An urgent need for a system which facilitates the evaluation of persistence APIs to developers. • A semi-automatic system for evaluating the performance and scalability of ontology persistence APIs. • A need for taking into account in the persistence APIs in a high level of abstraction, such as: object level. • New research results on metrics and systems for evaluating performance and scalability of ontology persistence APIs.