Rollen im Web of Data: Analyse, RDF-basiertes Rollenmodell und zugehöriger Data Browser

In the World Wide Web a mass of information is only available as hypertext. While perfectly suitable for human consumption, machines have difficulties to process such information. In the Semantic Web, an extension of the World Wide Web, content is represented in a way that facilitates automatic processing of data and, thus, allows (semi-)automation of various tasks. A concrete implementation of the Semantic Web is the Web of Data. It is based on HTTP, URIs and RDF. Linked Data Browsers, such as Tabulator, allow users to explore and to analyse distributed and linked data on the Semantic Web. In object-oriented modeling and object-oriented systems, roles are considered as an important construct for representing different aspects of real world objects as well as a means for managing evolving objects. Some approaches represent roles as specialization of object types (e.g. employee as subclass of person); other approaches represent them as adjunct objects (e.g. employee as adjunct to person). Although there is no consensus about the details of role representation, their importance is widely acknowledged. However, to the best of my knowledge, roles have not been discussed in the context of Semantic Web and Web of Data. In this thesis, an RDF-based role model for the Web of Data is introduced. For that purpose a role model for object-oriented systems is analysed and serves as basis for the RDF-based role model. The different basic conditions in object-oriented systems and in the Web of Data are contrasted. Furthermore, use cases for roles in the Web of Data are defined in order to, then, derive requirements for the role model. After conceptually introducing roles for the web of data, its implementation as RDF vocabulary is introduced and exemplified. Finally, an extension of the Linked Data Browser Tabulator is presented. This extended data browser is used to visualize and explore role-enhanced RDF-data.