Tupelo is a data and metadata management system based on semantic web technologies. Tupelo provides a variety of generic utilities for managing data and metadata using both best-of-breed semantic database implementations such as Jena and Sesame, as well as ordinary storage technologies such as flat files. Tupelo makes data and metadata portable across a variety of Contexts and deployment scenarios, including desktop applications, web-based applications, and more complex distributed architectures. Its use of global identification and explicit semantics means that metadata created and managed with Tupelo can be easily exported and used by a wide variety of RDF-aware tools and technologies.