When they were out of sight Ali Baba came down, and, going up to the rock, said, "Open, Sesame." The door at once opened, and Ali Baba, entering, found himself in a large cave, lighted from a hole in the top, and full of all kinds of treasure--rich silks and carpets, gold and silver ware, and great bags of money. He loaded his three asses with as many of the bags of gold as they could carry; and, after closing the door by saying, "Shut, Sesame," made his way home.
--Tales of 1001 Nights
In February 2000 the European IST project On-To-Knowledge kicked off. The goal of this project was to provide tools and a methodology for “content-driven knowledge management through evolving ontologies”.
In this project, the Dutch company Aduna (then known as Aidministrator Nederland b.v.) developed Sesame. Sesame fullfills the role of storage and retrieval middleware for ontologies and metadata expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. Another tool developed in On-To-Knowledge is OMM, the Ontology Middleware Module, which was developed by OntoText. OMM is an extension of Sesame that adds features such as change tracking and improved security.
Currently, Sesame and OMM are being further developed as an open source software product, by Aduna in cooperation with and partially funded by the NLNet Foundation, and by OntoText. The goal is to provide a stable, efficient and scalable middleware platform for storing, retrieving, manipulating and managing ontologies and metadata stored in RDF, RDF Schema and more expressive languages like OWL.
We aren't there yet, but it's looking good, we hope. This document is here to provide you, the Sesame user, with helpful information on how to deploy Sesame in various contexts, such as a database add-on in a client-server setting, or as a Java library to add functionality to stand-alone applications.
We hope this document will get you started, and of course we hope that you find Sesame easy to use and, well, good. Being an open source product in development also means that we are very keen on receiving feedback from our users. If you have questions, comments, if you think something is wrong with Sesame, or you have a good idea on how to improve it, please let us know. Contact us through the forums and/or issue tracker that are available on the Sesame website: www.openrdf.org.
We wish to conclude with a big thank you to all of you who have been (and indeed still are) supportive of this project, in particular Teus Hagen, Wytze van der Raay, Frank van Harmelen, Andy Seaborne, Peter Mika and Jacco van Ossenbruggen. Special thanks go to Holger Lausen for providing the Oracle implementation of the RDF Sail.
The Sesame and OMM development teams.