Symfony and Semantic Web

After completing the theory of my master thesis, I was looking for a quick solution to implement it. Since I had some good experiences with Symfony framework, I finally decided to utilize it for implementing my master project.

SemCEM

 My project consists of three technologies: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0 and Semantic Web. It aims to find a common point between these technologies to make creation of enterprise mashups semi-automatically. Web 2.0 has a wealth of data but poor semantics and difficult integration. On the other hand, While Semantic Web solves the integration problem issue but suffers from a dearth of users. Combining these two technologies will result in a rich Web of data that is usable by both humans and machines. In my research I found out that RESTful web services are the key to this solution. REST-based architecture puts a smiley on SOA, thereby makes it more practical to be used by non-professional users. I proposed an annotation mechanism for RESTful services. The next step was implementing a mashup editor that supports my proposed model. In this step I used Symfony 1.2 that has a good support of REST architecture in conjunction with pOWL. pOWL is a Web Based Platform for Collaborative Semantic Web Development. It consists of 6 stacked tiers:

• pOWL store – SQL compatible relational database backend
•  RDFAPI, RDFSAPI, OWLAPI – layered APIs for handling RDF, RDF-Schema (RDFS) and OWL
• pOWL API – containing classes and functions to build web applications on top of those APIs
• User interface – a set of PHP pages combining widgets provided by pOWL API for accessing (browsing, viewing, editing) model data in a pOWL store

Although I encountered some problems using PUT and DELETE methods of HTTP, but the final result was great. I could finish my project at three weeks thanks to good and useful Symfony plug-ins. The most time-consuming part was integrating pOWL into Symfony that was done approximately well. I called my mashup editor “SemCEM“. I have not released it yet, but I have some plans in near future to publish a demo version on semcem.com. ………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Diary:

+ Unfortunately thanks to assistant chair of our faculty plus some uninvited issues, my defense session for master degree was postpones to September!

+ My paper entitled “ Using an Enterprise Mashup Infrastructure for Just-in-Time Management of Situational Projects ” was accepted in IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2009). I am planning to have a trip to China to present it if possible.

 + In August I will have a trip to Amsterdam to make some important decisions for my future!

+ Besides many disappointing side effects of Iran Elections, I had this chance to be familiar with Parsatech Group, an active group with great ideas in IT.