JRDF is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 framework for Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

. It provides an object oriented model of RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 graphs including URI

Úri

Úriis a village and commune in the comitatus of Pest in Hungary....

s, Literals and Blank Nodes

Blank node

In RDF, a blank node is a node in an RDF graph representing a resource for which a URI or literal is not given. The resource represented by a blank node is also called an anonymous resource...

. It was initially released in 2003 from work on the TKS and Kowari triple stores (later Mulgara

Mulgara (software)

Mulgara is a triplestore and fork of the original Kowari project. It is Open Source, scalable, and transaction-safe. Mulgara instances can be queried via the iTQL query language and the SPARQL query language.-History:...

) in order to provide an API that could be used to bridge other APIs such as Jena

Jena (framework)

Jena is an open source Semantic Web framework for Java. It provides an API to extract data from and write to RDF graphs. The graphs are represented as an abstract "model". A model can be sourced with data from files, databases, URLs or a combination of these...

 and to correctly model RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 concepts . These APIs allow RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 to be created and written using various formats such as N3 and RDF/XML. It has an implementation of SPARQL

SPARQL

SPARQL is an RDF query language; its name is an acronym that stands for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and considered as one of the key technologies of semantic web...

 although it is not complete. RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 graphs can be stored in memory or on disk through various persistence layers. In 2008, JRDF implemented a triple store across Hadoop

Hadoop

Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data...

 using a technique called RDF molecules .

JRDF is similar to other frameworks such as Jena

Jena (framework)

Jena is an open source Semantic Web framework for Java. It provides an API to extract data from and write to RDF graphs. The graphs are represented as an abstract "model". A model can be sourced with data from files, databases, URLs or a combination of these...

 and Sesame

Sesame (framework)

Sesame is an open-source framework for querying and analyzing RDF data. It was created, and is still being maintained, by the Dutch software company . It was originally developed as part of the "On-To-Knowledge", a semantic web project that ran from 1999 to 2002. It contains a triplestore.Sesame...

 although it does not currently provide support for OWL (Web Ontology Language

Web Ontology Language

The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...

).