It was created by the Dutch software company Aduna as part of "On-To-Knowledge", a semantic web project that ran from 1999 to 2002.

Parsers and writers for popular RDF serialisations are distributed along with RDF4J, and users can easily extend the list by putting their parsers and writers on the Java classpath when running their application.

[1] Many other triplestores can be used through the RDF4J API, including Ontotext GraphDB (built as a SAIL), Mulgara, and AllegroGraph.

It can, for example, be used to add indexing and query capabilities to all compatible stores: In May 2016, Sesame officially forked into an Eclipse project called RDF4J,[4] in recognition of Aduna no longer being involved in its development.

[5] This official fork brings the core developers with it and is supported by several commercial companies.