Abstract
The dawn of the 21st century saw the emergence of a number of technologies which not only revolutionized human lives but also opened new avenues of research. Semantic Web technology is one of the technologies which attracted tremendous research attention around the globe. To successfully implement Semantic Web, technologies have been developed to effectively represent, create, and navigate metadata relationship among the Web resources. Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps (TMs) emerged as the leading technologies of the newly envisioned Semantic Web. RDF and TMs are independent technologies using different mechanisms to represent semantic relationships between the Web resources. A number of serialization formats have been investigated by the researchers in the past few years for successful storage and transmission of RDF and TMs data. However, different representation mechanisms and serialization formats result into the problem of interoperability, potentially resulting in the division of the Semantic Web into two islands. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the available serialization formats of RDF and TMs by categorizing, analysing, and evaluating them using a set of criteria. For evaluation purpose, simple book ontology is developed in both RDF and TMs formats. It has been observed that serialization formats vary in different aspects but are powerful enough to encode their respective data models and the interoperability among them is possible, subject to some additional effort. This investigation provides a compact platform for researchers to solve the interoperability problem among serialization formats to accelerate the growth of Semantic Web.