Re: contrasing SPARQL Federation + DM/R2RML vs. SQL federation tools

On 2/13/12 11:13 AM, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> I'm giving a talk at SemTech which I'm lead to believe will cover SPARQL over SQL databases. One of the motivators for the SemWeb is that we get to connect everything to everything, including e.g. sets of SQL DBs. The relational world has some tooling for the latter case, e.g. "Oracle Database Streams" and "SQL Server Integration Services". What do y'all know about them? It could help some audience members if I were able to contrast existing SQL tooling against SPARQL over DB-backed RDF graphs.
>
Eric,

This is best done via a demo. Luckily, we have a simple HTML5+WebDB demo 
that showcases:

1. WebDB to ODBC
2. WebDB to XMLA (basically, how you interact with an ODBC Data Source 
Name [DSNs] on a remote machine thereby alleviating the need to 
configure it locally)
3. Attaching remote/external ODBC DSNs to Virtuoso
4. Generating Linked Data views over the remote ODBC DSNs using R2RML 
via a Wizard
5. Querying the attached ODBC DSNs using SQL -- here we use green links 
to showcase "intensional" data navigation via internal references we 
automagically generate from foreign key relations in the RDBMS
6. Querying the Linked Data views using SPASQL -- here we use blue links 
to showcase "intensional" data navigation via Linked Data URIs
7. Querying the LOD Cloud using SPASQL -- ditto .

R2RML deals with a critical fork in the road re. DBMS technology [1]. 
The fork in question is the move from extensional interaction with data 
to intensional, courtesy of de-referencable URI style of references.


Intensional interaction with DBMS data that leverages power of URI 
abstraction is the key to addressing the following critical data issues 
of our time:

1. Data Volume
2. Data Velocity
3. Data Variety (Heterogeneity)
4. Data Location Disparity.

Some like to call this "Big Data", but as Jim Hendler aptly alluded to 
in a Tweet last week, this is really about "Broad Data". Basically, 
bringing your DBMS records to life -- as I once noted circa. 1998 :-)

In the coming days I will drop a series of posts and demos re. R2RML and 
the HTML5-WebDB bridge applications that we've developed. Of course, you 
can also have a quick play if you are comfortable with the rough (a 
little dated) installation guides [2][3] we've published.

Links:

1. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1961297 -- a really nice paper 
that nails the issues re. DBMS tech fork in the road
2. 
http://wikis.openlinksw.com/dataspace/owiki/wiki/UdaWikiWeb/HTML5ODBCExplorerSampleProg 
- ODBC Explorer
3. 
http://wikis.openlinksw.com/dataspace/owiki/wiki/UdaWikiWeb/HTML5XMLAExplorerSampleProg 
- XMLA Explorer .

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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