Migrating an Existing Application to the Semantic Web

his is the third article in a series that describes the why, what, and how to migrate an existing application to the semantic web. The first article, "Why Migrate to the Semantic Web," outlined the reasons for migrating an existing web application to the semantic web. The second article, "Laying the Foundation of a Semantic Web Application," focused on selecting a suitable semantic web framework (Jena plus SDB).

This article focuses on migrating a CDMS web application that supports quality assurance and compliance checking in the Australian building and construction industries to the semantic web. As a part of this process:

• Information useful to the general building industry but previously hidden within the application becomes publicly available as Linked Data.
• The existing domain model classes are mapped to RDF.
• The security model is refactored to incorporate FOAF-based social networking information.

Publishing Selected Database Tables as Linked Data

Stored in a MySQL database within CDMS is a subset of information that you can share with the general building and construction industry to help promote a higher, uniform standard of quality. This subset is described in the article "Constructing an Ontology - Common Inspection and Test Plans." The central concept is an Inspection and Test Plan (ITP) that identifies when and what will be inspected and verified to meet acceptance criteria.