Web Interface for Querying/Searching RDF Database

The resource description framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources on the web. However, RDF can also be used to describe other data and relationships between objects in the data. Many applications in the signal/image processing (SIP) community (such as radar imaging, electromagnetics, etc.) generate large amounts of data. Researchers would like to have online access to this data as well as the ability to easily explore and mine the data. Our application's RDF metadata representation is similar to that of a conventional database, and users can use forms to search the database, or use the standard RDF query language SPARQL, to create queries. In most cases, all the data as well as the RDF description of the data resides on secure Department of Defense (DoD) major shared resource center (MSRC) resources. In order to provide a web interface for exploring this data, we need a secure way to access the user data. Towards this goal, we use the user interface toolkit (UIT) to provide a web application that allows users to browse and search the RDF metadata of large SIP databases securely and conveniently on their desktop. The UIT uses the same Kerberos technology and Secure ID cards that are used to access all MSRC machines and provides an application programming interface (API) for building clients to access computing resources in the DoD high performance computing and modernization program (HPCMP).