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Has anyone used, implemented, knows or just have heard of any graph (especially RDF) to object mapping frameworks for java.

We are evaluating frameworks at the moment. So far we have:

Luiggi Mendoza
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Thomas Fritz
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  • Thomas, I've worked on an internal framework. What are you trying to do, and what are your evaluation criteria? – Dilum Ranatunga Aug 04 '11 at 11:37
  • We are evaluating such frameworks for the next major version of our Web based SKOS Editor. At the moment we also use a selfmade framework because at the beginning of development about 3 years ago there was nothing available. One major criteria is that can be used and deals with the complete "feature set" of RDF and so SKOS. – Thomas Fritz Aug 04 '11 at 12:31
  • What is motivating you to move away from your existing framework? – Dilum Ranatunga Aug 04 '11 at 12:36
  • Actually because it is not the feature richest and not the convenient one. Actually we could invest time to fix that issues but we would rather use an existing solution. – Thomas Fritz Aug 04 '11 at 15:36
  • There is also the http://java.net/projects/sommer project, although I do not know any details about its current state. – mwuersch Sep 01 '11 at 15:14
  • A similar question on semanticweb.com: http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/3251/experience-using-java-based-frameworks-for-rdf-to-pojo-and-vice-versa-mapping – Thomas Fritz Sep 08 '11 at 08:42
  • There is one paper now under review that compares most of these http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/comparison-object-triple-mapping-frameworks (not affiliated) – berezovskyi Aug 08 '18 at 13:21

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There is also RDF2Go, which has has RDFReactor.

I remember that Elmo is very nicely done, using only interfaces for class definitions, and java-proxy objects for the implementations allow quite clean multiple inheritance...

In general though I wonder if these frameworks really are worth it. The theory is that they hide the "complexity" of RDF and allow normal java programmers to work with RDF - but in the process they also hide one of the main benefits of RDF, being able to deal with data-structured not known at compile time.

The "schemalessness" of RDF is great for small projects, or for extending normal schemas, and of course RDFS offers a way to formalise and standardise your new properties/classes when you need to. As Kendall Clark says "Correctness when it matters; sloppiness when it doesn’t". If you pre-generate all your object interfaces from a schema you lose all this - of course you could have a generic bean interface at the top (i.e. DynaBean) which would let you query for properties not in your scheam, but then you could just as well just use the Jena OntResource.

gromgull
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