Are RDF / Triple Stores suited for storing application data? (as opposed to the graph Metadata)

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I'm trying to create a small web application for a "personal information manager" / wiki kind of tool where I can take notes in the form of HTML snippets (or maybe Markdown), annotate them with some https://schema.org/ microdata and store both the snippet and the metadata somewhere for querying.

My understanding so far is that most semantic data stores (triple/quad stores, or databases supporting RDF) are better suited for storing and querying mainly the metadata. So I'll probably also want some traditional store of some sort (relational, document store, key-value, or even a non-rdf graph db) where I can store the full text of each note and maybe some other bits like time of last access, user-id that owns the note, etc, and also perform traditional (non-semantic) fulltext queries.

I started looking for stores that would allow me to store both data and metadata in a single place. I found a few: Ontotext GraphDB, Stardog, MarkLogic, etc. All of these seem to do exactly what I want, but have some pretty limiting free license terms that really discourage me from studying them in depth: I prefer to study open technologies that I could potentially use on a real product.

Before digging deeper, I was wondering:

  1. If my assumption is correct: that I'll need to use one store for the data and another for the metadata.
  2. if there's any setup involving free/open source software that developers with experience in RDF/Sparql can recommend, given the problem I describe.

Right now I'm just leaning towards using Apache Jena for the RDF store and SPARQL queries, and something completely independent for the rest of the data (PostgreSQL most likely).

schema.org sparql semantic-web rdf database
1 Answers

Before digging deeper, I was wondering:

If my assumption is correct: that I'll need to use one store for the data and another for the metadata.

Not necessarily, no, though there certainly are some cases in which that distinction may be useful. But most RDF databases offer scalable storage for both data and metadata. The only requirement is that your (meta)data is represented as RDF. If you're worried about performance of things like text queries, most of them offer support for full-text indexing through Lucene, Solr, or Elasticsearch.

if there's any setup involving free/open source software that developers with experience in RDF/Sparql can recommend, given the problem I describe.

This is really not the right place to ask this question. Tool recommendations are considered off-topic on StackOverflow since they attract biased answers. But as said, there's plenty of tools, both open-source/free and commercial, that you can look into. I suggest you pick one you like the look of, experiment a bit, and perhaps talk to that particular tool's community to explain what you're trying to do. Apache Jena and Eclipse Rdf4j are two popular open-source projects, but there's plenty of others.

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