Towards a Universal Query Language for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps

ABSTRACT Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps are the two prominent technologies of Semantic Web developed for the purpose to make Web useful for humans and 'understandable' by machines by facilitating knowledge integration and sharing. The basic goal of RDF and Topic Maps is the same, i.e. to successfully turn the vision of semantic web into reality by attaching rich structured semantics to web contents. The problem of interoperability between RDF and Topic Maps emerged due to the difference in their fundamental architectures and their owner organizations which may lead to islands on the future web. The architecture of RDF and Topic Maps is also complex and a suitable query language is the essential pats of it for the precise and quick retrieval of required information from RDF and Topic Maps. Therefore, several types of query languages have been developed for both technologies to retrieve the required information precisely from both RDF and Topic Maps. These query languages have the capability of logic and inferencing and may be used to address the problem of interoperability. The purpose of this paper is to thoroughly investigate all aspects of the available query languages developed for RDF and Topic Maps. In this paper, a comprehensive literature study and comparison of RDF and Topic Maps query languages has been done according to different parameters. It is concluded that a universal query language capable of retrieving and filtering both RDF and Topic Maps data is possible subjected to little more efforts. This paper will not only provide a jump start in the field for new comers but will also help future researchers in selecting one query language over the other for their applications