Re: Functions to compute URIs

When we discussed this during the RDB2RDF XG there were a couple of people
that talked about creating URIs for well-known concepts such as cities and persons.
In their proposal, you would take the key value and then do a search on their database
which would return a URI if it was available for that entity.
The OKKAM project was one example.

I am not sure we want to go into that much detail in the spec.  I think "user provided
conversion functions" should cover it.
All the best, Ashok

On 6/8/2011 9:20 AM, David McNeil wrote:
>
>     If the information is not in the database, how do you expect R2RML to
>     know about it?
>
>     > In the past I believe we have talked about satisfying this type of
>     > need (in the context of ISSUE-7), by defining a framework for plugging
>     > in user provided conversion functions without specifying the detailed
>     > form which those plugins would take.
>
>     My understanding is that RDB2RDF technologies shouldn't know *anything*
>     about what's outside the database. This work should be done with other
>     technologies, eg. rule engines.
>
>
> In the past, in order to satisfy the goal in our charter of supporting the notion of linked data, we talked about defining a mechanism to invoke a URI generating function on data from the relational database. This would create the opportunity to pull in data or an algorithm from outside of the relational database and outside of the mapping itself. Perhaps we never settled whether this is really a good idea? I seem to recall that D2RQ has a mechanism something like this so perhaps Richard can provide a perspective on how useful this is in practice.
>
> -David