Jena Tutorial

Introduction

Jena is a toolkit for developing applications within the semantic web.

This tutorial is an introduction as to how to use Jena. It is intended primarily for the Java programmer with only a limited familiarity with semantic web concepts. It can be used as a hands-on first course in semantic web technologies, particularly RDF.

The student with both Java and semantic web experience should proceed at an accelerated pace, skipping easier parts.

The primary version of the course is this web version. This is intended for students working alone or in pairs.

There is also a user manual for the OWL Ontology API.

There is also a tutorial about SPARQL and the ARQ query processor for Jena.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is knowledge of Java.

Knowledge of any of the following is helpful:

• RDF
• XML
• URIs

Students with no knowledge of any of the above should take the course quite slowly, and may need additional support on some of the topics.

Goals

After completing the course you will be able to:

• Understand RDF as a graph rather than an XML document.
• Load an RDF/XML file into Java using Jena.
• Write an RDF graph as an RDF/XML file using Jena.
• Navigate an RDF graph within Jena.

Course Contents

1. The Jena API
   1. Introduction
   2. Statements
   3. Writing RDF
   4. Reading RDF
   5. Jena RDF Packages
   6. Navigating a Graph
   7. Querying a Graph
   8. Operations on Graphs
   9. Exceptions
   10. Containers
   11. More about Literals and Datatypes
   12. Glossary