Ontology Development in dot NET Platform: An Empirical Assessment

Ontology has been a subject of interest to Semantic Web developers in the past decade. However, only a few has used the Microsoft .NET platform for building ontologies despite its popularity in the software industry. A large part of ontology research in the field of Semantic Web has been done using open source platforms. This study applies Semantic Web technologies to develop ontology in SemWeb.NET, a Semantic Web library for Microsoft .NET. The experiments show that there is lack of tools in SemWeb.NET for a user-friendly editing of ontology as well as parsing and querying RDF graphs of ontologies stored in popular RDBMS such as MySQL, from C# applications. These findings suggest that further research be carried out to extend the SemWeb.NET library with APIs for graphical user interface and user-friendly editing of ontologies as well as suitable plug-ins for parsing and querying ontologies from relational databases.