Re: Patent application on converting SPARQL to SQL

As you know, we (UT Austin) have been working with Microsoft, but
internally, there is a lot of miscommunication (I guess this may be common
in large corporartions).

We are working with the lead guy in the SQL Server optimization group. He
was not aware of this and I asked him about this patent. He is looking into
this.

And, if I am not wrong, Microsoft bought Intellidiension [1], so this patent
may be coming from them.

I know Eric has already a lot of experience in SPARQL to SQL. We are also
writing up a report of the SPARQL to SQL stuff thats in Oracle (our intent
is to submit to ESWC2010).

At the moment, the most complete and formal work that I know of is from
Chebotko et al. Here is a TR [2] and here is the journal version [3].
Another work is from Cleveland Clinic from their rdf store [4].

I've been going through Chebtoko's stuff. Very complete... too complete IMO.
He defines a relational alegbra for sparql and then proves that the sparql
alegbra can be translated to the new sparql relational alegbra. In our work,
we haven't "complicated" our selves that much. I don't think Eric has
either. But this is for another discussion.

Cheers and talk to you all later.


[1] http://www.intellidimension.com/
[2] http://www.cs.wayne.edu/~artem/main/research/TR-DB-052006-CLJF.pdf
[3]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TYX-4W32KH3-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=08d07b63a9c6a905139e0f6634cd76f9
[4] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1620437

Juan Sequeda, Ph.D Student
Dept. of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
www.juansequeda.com
www.semanticwebaustin.org


On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 8:29 AM, ashok malhotra
<ashok.malhotra@oracle.com>wrote:

> This is a patent application.  The patent has not been granted yet.
>  Regardless of what we feel are the chances
> for its success we should argue against it because, if it is granted, all
> vendors may end up paying Microsoft to
> license the technology.
> What we need are publicly available papers that describe SPARQL to SQL
> mapping.  In the reference from Ivan Herman
> Jim Hendler says they did some work in this area.  Perhaps Virtuoso has
> something in its product literature that we can cite.  There may be other
> papers that RDB2RDF WG members have published.
>
> The technique seems to depend on a particular method for storing the
> triples.  I could not figure this out as I did not
> get the figures with the application.  If, of course, the technique works
> only with a special storage strategy then it does
> not apply if you store the triples in a different way.
> All the best, Ashok
>
>
>
> Michael Hausenblas wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Just stumbled upon [1] that there is a pending SPARQL to SQL patent
>> application [2] by Microsoft ... anyone knows more about this?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>      Michael
>>
>> [1] http://twitter.com/ivan_herman/status/6686176991
>> [2] http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090138437
>>
>>
>>
>
>