Which Triplestore for rapid semantic web development?

Question

Ease of installation/use is the most important factor here - not performance.

Small is OK as large datasets are not expected.

Answer 1

I've been impressed with ARC2 as a PHP/MySQL offering. The project website has a helpful "Getting Started" to get you up and running quickly and questions/problems are addressed quickly on the mailing list. Depending on what you are trying to do, SPARQLscript, a mini-language add-on to ARC2 for processing query results may be very useful.

Answer 2

I'd also recommend sesame, its lightweight, pretty easy to install, and provides good performance for small datasets. Query performance is far better with Sesame 1.2.x than Sesame 2.x because of the addition of context support to the 2.x series.

I've tested sesame installation/deployment with tomcat, resin, and jetty, and it worked easily with all of them. I don't recommend the bindings to RDBMS components such as Postgres or MySQL, at least in the 1.x series, performance was not acceptable, even for prototype applications. The in-memory and native implementations provide good query performance and offer simple persistence, though they lack true transactions.

Jena has a decent API, and a lot more support for databases, reasoners, etc, but has a larger footprint, and is a little more cumbersome to use on the whole.