Ontology Development in dot NET Platform: An Empirical Assessment Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermarizburg, South Africa fonoudombeuj@ukzn.ac.za Victor Kadiata Kadiata Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences Vaal University of Technology Vanderbijlpark, South Africa vickadiata@gmail.com Abstract—Ontology has been a subject of interest to Semantic Web developers in the past decade. However, only a few has used the Microsoft .NET platform for building ontologies despite its popularity in the software industry. A large part of ontology research in the field of Semantic Web has been done using open source platforms. This study applies Semantic Web technologies to develop ontology in SemWeb.NET, a Semantic Web library for Microsoft .NET. The experiments show that there is lack of tools in SemWeb.NET for a user-friendly editing of ontology as well as parsing and querying RDF graphs of ontologies stored in popular RDBMS such as MySQL, from C# applications. These findings suggest that further research be carried out to extend the SemWeb.NET library with APIs for graphical user interface and user-friendly editing of ontologies as well as suitable plug-ins for parsing and querying ontologies from relational databases. Keywords—Semantic Web, Ontology, RDF, SemWeb.NET, Mi- crosoft .NET, SPARQL I. I NTRODUCTION Semantic Web is an evolution of the current World Wide Web in which information is represented with the meaning of its content rather than Web links like in the current Internet, to enable computers to automatically process Web content [1]. The meaning of Web content is represented with ontology and described formally in logic based syntaxes such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), Darpa Agent Markup Language (DAML), etc. to facilitate their integration and interoperability. Ontol- ogy is commonly defined as an explicit specification of a conceptualization [2]. A conceptualization is an abstract and simplified view of a domain of knowledge to be represented for a certain purpose; the domain could be explicitly and formally represented using existing objects, concepts, entities and the relationships that exist between them [2]. Ontology is the backbone of any Semantic Web application; it provides a common and shared representation of knowledge in a domain in machine readable syntaxes, thereby, enabling computers to automatically discover reason and infer new knowledge over the Web. With the advent of Semantic Web, ontology has attracted developers in several domains such as e-commerce, e-business, e-learning, video and multimedia, e-health, e-government, etc.; where there is need to develop intelligent web-based applica- tions that can be easily integrated and interoperated to perform complex transactions/operations over the Internet. Meanwhile, a number of Semantic Web tools including Prot´ ege ´ , OntoStu- dio, SWOOP, TODE, Odase, and so forth have been developed [3][4]. These tools enable ontology developers to edit ontolo- gies. Most of these tools are open-sources and include several external packages for the reasoning, learning and management of ontologies. Unfortunately, despite the emergence of few Semantic Web tools for the Microsoft .NET platform such as TODE [4], Knowledge.NET [5] and SemWeb.NET [6], there is a lack of enthusiasm in the practice of Semantic Web development within the .NET community [4]. Consequently, only a few studies have carried out a detailed research on Semantic Web and ontology development in the Microsoft .NET platform to date. In light of the above, this research conducts an empirical assessment of Microsoft .NET platform in ontology develop- ment. A quantitative method based on experiments is used. A conceptual ontology is utilized as a dataset an its RDF version is created in the SemWeb.NET library configured in Microsoft Visual Studio in C#. The experimental results obtained are then used to empirically discuss the features of the SemWeb.NET package with regard to ontology development. The experiments show that there is lack of tools in SemWeb.NET for a user friendly edition of ontology as well as parsing and querying RDF graphs of ontologies stored in popular RDBMS such as MySQL from C# applications. These findings s uggest t hat f urther r esearch be c arried o ut to extend the SemWeb.NET library with APIs for graphical user interface and user friendly edition of ontologies as well as suit- able plug-ins for parsing and querying ontologies to and from RDBMS as in popular open-source Semantic Web frameworks such as Sesame, Jena, etc. [16]. Such improvement along with this study would certainly attract more Semantic Web developers to use the Microsoft .NET platform for practicing Semantic Web technologies, thereby, contributing to lifting its popularity in the Semantic Web community. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents related studies. The materials and methods utilized in the study are explained in Section 3. Section 4 presents the experiments and results of the study and a conclusion ends the paper in the last section.