Hi Jeen,
This looks very nice. It was a bit of a struggle to figure out rdf4j (sesame at that time) when I first got started, the guides at the time were a bit shorter than this one and a bit less step by step.
Thanks! The Programming manual covers a lot, but it’s not really organised in a step-by-step fashion. So yeah, this tutorial is something I felt we were missing for a long time.
I also never used Models for anything, and still don’t. In our project we use iterators or SPARQL to interact with our data, which meant we ended up with a Repository.
Well, as I hope the tutorial demonstrates, you can use Models and Repositories together just fine. The way to think of a Model is simply a collection of statements (like a List or a Set). A materialised iteration, if you will. They’re a lot more flexible to work with than iterations, which you can only really just loop over, and which require careful coding to make sure they get closed when done. Models are a handy way to ship small bits of RDF data around in your code. Of course, the advantage of iterations is that they’re far more scalable.
Models were a bit confusing coming from Jena, where models can be used with SPARQL queries.
Yeah, I can imagine. In earlier versions of Sesame, we called this collection object a Graph. But we changed this to Model at some point, because it can in fact contain more than one (named) graph. We never really considered the potential confusion with Jena’s Model interface (which is, indeed, quite different).
