FW: Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo

Friedrich, I'm forwarding your message to one of the W3 lists.

Some of your questions could be easily answered (e.g. for euro in your
context, you don't have a predicate for that, you have an Observation
with units of a currency and you could take the currency from
dbpedia, the predicate is "units").

But I think your concerns are quite valid generally and your
experience reflects that of most web site developers that encounter
RDF.

LOD list, Friedrich is a clueful developer, responsible for
http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ amongst other things. What can we
learn from this? How do we make this better?

-w


----- Forwarded message from Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich@pudo.org> -----

From: Friedrich Lindenberg <friedrich@pudo.org>
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:56:20 +0100
Message-Id: <A9089567-6107-4B43-B442-D09DCC0C353D@pudo.org>
To: wdmmg-discuss <wdmmg-discuss@lists.okfn.org>
Subject: [wdmmg-discuss] Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo

(reposting to list):

Hi all, 

As an action from OGDCamp, Rufus and I agreed that we should resume porting WDMMG to RDF in order to make the data model more flexible and to allow a merger between WDMMG, OffenerHaushalt and similar other projects. 

After a few days, I'm now over the whole idea of porting WDMMG to RDF. Having written a long technical pro/con email before (that I assume contained nothing you don't already know), I think the net effect of using RDF would be the following: 

* Lots of coolness, sucking up to linked data people.
* Further research regarding knowledge representation.

vs.

* Unstable and outdated technological base. No triplestore I have seen so far seemed on par with MySQL 4. 
* No freedom wrt to schema, instead modelling overhead. Spent 30 minutes trying to find a predicate for "Euro".
* Scares off developers. Invested 2 days researching this, which is how long it took me to implement OHs backend the first time around. Project would need to be sustained through linked data grad students.
* Less flexibility wrt to analytics, querying and aggregation. SPARQL not so hot.
* Good chance of chewing up the UI, much harder to implement editing.

I normally enjoy learning new stuff. This is just painful. Most of the above points are probably based on my ignorance, but it really shouldn't take a PhD to process some gov spending tables. 

I'll now start a mongo effort because I really think this should go schema-free + I want to get stuff moving. If you can hold off loading Uganda and Israel for a week that would of course be very cool, we could then try to evaluate how far this went. Progress will be at: http://bitbucket.org/pudo/wdmmg-core 

Friedrich



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Received on Wednesday, 24 November 2010 12:47:54 UTC