Abstract
Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps (TMs) are the two prominent technologies, envisioned for realizing Semantic Web. RDF and Topic Maps are independent technologies developed by separate organizations, both providing mechanisms for enriching web contents with metadata for representing semantic relationships among them. This, ultimately, makes the Web more useful and ‘understandable’ both for humans and machines and improves knowledge sharing and integration across different domains. Both of these standards have established their respective user-communities. Because of using different semantic representation mechanisms, this results in the problem of interoperability potentially dividing the Semantic Web into two separate islands. This study aimed at investigating the two technologies and to discover that how their interoperability problem can be solved by enabling them to work together. To achieve this objective, a comprehensive literature review of the two technologies was performed and is reported here to describe the architectures, serialization formats, tools & APIs, query languages, and realworld applications of both the technologies. For testing purposes, a Book Ontology was developed in both RDF and TMs standards by employing their respective ontology development tools and serialization formats. The ontology was imported in their respective applications and results were evaluated which justify that the interoperability between RDF and TMs is possible, enabling them to work in a complementary fashion.
