The openRDF.org site is a community site that is the center for all Sesame-related development. Here, developers and users can meet and discuss, ask questions and submit problem reports. The latest news about Sesame will be posted here.

Sesame is an open source RDF framework with support for RDF Schema inferencing and querying. Originally, it was developed by Aduna (then known as Aidministrator) as a research prototype for the EU research project On-To-Knowledge. Now, it is further developed and maintained by Aduna in cooperation with NLnet Foundation, developers from Ontotext, and a number of volunteer developers who contribute ideas, bug reports and fixes.

Sesame has been designed with flexibility in mind. It can be deployed on top of a variety of storage systems (relational databases, in-memory, filesystems, keyword indexers, etc.), and offers a large scala of tools to developers to leverage the power of RDF and RDF Schema, such as a flexible access API, which supports both local and remote (through HTTP or RMI) access, and several query languages, of which SeRQL is the most powerful one.

Sesame's main developers are Arjohn Kampman and Jeen Broekstra .

The Sesame framework has received many contributions from various people over the years, whom we gratefully wish to acknowledge. In no particular order we would like to thank Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Sebastian Weber, James Leigh, Peter Mika, Ryan Levering, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Damyan Ognyanov, and of course all members of the OpenRDF forum. If you belong in this list but we forgot you: shame on us, let us know so we can correct it.

"Rio" stands for RDF I/O. It is a set of parsers and writers for RDF that has been designed with speed and standards-compliance as the main concerns. Currently it supports reading and writing of RDF/XML and N-Triples, and writing of N3. Rio is part of Sesame, but can also be used as a separate tool, and can be downloaded separately.

Elmo is a toolkit for developing Semantic Web applications using Sesame. Elmo wraps Sesame, providing a dedicated API for a number of well known web ontologies including Dublin Core, RSS and FOAF. The dedicated API makes it easier to work with RDF data for the supported ontologies. Elmo also offers a set of tools related to the supported ontologies, including an RDF crawler, a FOAF smusher and a FOAF validator.

Elmo's API is extensible and is expected to cover a larger set of existing web ontologies as it matures. Download pointers to the Elmo distribution can be found here.

Elmo's main developers are Peter Mika and James Leigh.

Aduna is a Dutch software company that develops software for effortless information disclosure. Aduna has strong ties with both the academic world and the semantic web community, and has been the driving force behind Sesame since it started life as an On-To-Knowledge research prototype. More information about Aduna and its products can be found at www.aduna-software.com.

Stichting NLnet's primary goal is to stimulate new developments in network (internet) technology for managing and maintaining the network connectivity, to improve existing technology, and to encourage new applications for existing technology. Stichting NLnet has chosen to do this by supporting non-proprietary (in most cases under General Public License scheme) network-oriented projects. For more information about NLnet see www.nlnet.nl.

NLnet has supported the development of Sesame both financially and with organizational advise since February 2002.