The RDF(s)-DB Protégé Plugin is a backend plugin to the Protégé ontology and knowledge-base editor. Protégé is a powerful program developed by Stanford University to model knowledge in an object model. The user can create a framework of a domain-specific knowledge (a class hierarchy), and fill in the actual domain knowledge by creating instances of these classes.
Protégé allows the user to save the domain framework and knowledge in many different internal formats called backends. One of the many choices for a backend is to store the framework and knowledge in the Resource Description Format (RDF). RDF was specified by the W3C to describe resources about the World Wide Web; however, its power and flexibility allow RDF to be a very suitable language to describe any type of resources.
Michael Sintek developed a backend plugin to Protégé that allows the user to store the framework and knowledge in RDF/XML format, which specifies a plain-text representation of an RDF description. The RDF(s)-DB Protégé Plugin is a set of classes which rests on top of Sintek's RDF/XML backend. The plugin allows the description to be stored in a different format: in an RDF database called Sesame.
Sesame was originally developed by a company called Aduna as a research prototype. It allows the user to interact with an RDF description using powerful query languages. Because Sesame internally stores data in a relational format, it is able to support multiple run-time queries much faster than a plain-text representation would be able to. This feature is even more useful in an enterprise situation when an application demands performance and parallel multi-user functionality.