- From: Lee Feigenbaum <feigenbl@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2006 19:59:11 -0500
- To: public-sweo-ig@w3.org
Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote on 12/08/2006 06:15:31 PM:
> Paul Walsh, Segala wrote:
> > Lee,
> >
> > I wouldn't like to focus any time (at this point) on things that we
don't
> > know about.
> >
> > I think you're concerns are well placed, but not for this group to
address
> > at this time IMHO. I propose we pick the low hanging fruit by
demonstrating
> > the real benefits with implementations that are out there today. Then
we can
> > focus on implementations in progress...
> >
> > ***Enough research!!*** More outreach!! ;)
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Paul
> >
>
> Paul,
>
> Wouldn't categorize this question as "High Hanging" fruit :-)
I hope not!
> What I think we could do with these kinds of questions is place them in
> a "Presumed" or "Assumed" Challenges Wiki document.
I agree with this; I don't know if our survey process will uncover anymore
concerns along these particular lines, but since one thing we're doing is
soliciting existing concerns about SW technologies, I felt that my
coworker's thoughts were valuable.
[more below]
> > Hi SWEOids,
> >
> > Wing and I had an interesting and somewhat enlightening conversation
with
> > another IBMer today. Our colleague was somewhat familiar with the SW
world
> > and is very familiar with the XML world, and he expressed concerns
that SW
> > technologies (and RDF / SPARQL in particular) may fall short in one
> > prominent area in which XML / XQuery shines: dealing with
content-oriented
> > (often mixed content) documents. He was concerned about this given
some of
> > our claims about the value of RDF/SW technologies as a unifying
> > environment for data and metadata.
> >
> > He gave various examples ranging from insurance policies to resumes to
> > rentral agreements, with the basic idea being that XQuery can easily
> > answer questions that involve searching within a document (or,
more-so,
> > searching for text in a particular paragraph of a document, perhaps
with
> > emphasis added) which uses XML markup. He wondered aloud and we
discussed
> > what the SW approach to this would be, and we agreed that it's lacking
> > right now. He expressed worry that whereas XML can wrap data that
might be
> > best expressed as relational or RDF data (and then join that data in
> > XQuery queries with document data), the RDF world may not have as nice
a
> > story.
> >
> > I (personally) need to think the issues here through a bit more, but
to me
> > it was not an objection that I've heard commonly, but it was an
> > interesting one to which I had no immediate response, so I wanted to
throw
> > it out here and solicit thoughts and/or feedback. (I don't think it's
> > imperative that we have an immediate or bulletproof response to every
> > potential SW objection, but thinking about where the technologies fall
> > short in addition to where they excel should help us craft our
messaging.)
> >
> > have a good weekend everyone,
> > Lee
> >
> >
> >
> >
> The question posed by the XQuery / XML enthusiast (and obvious RDF
> skeptic) makes too many assumptions about how, and where, RDF is
Actually, I would characterize this colleague as a definite RDF supporter,
especially for someone so highly involved in the XML world. I think it's
important that the SW community not think that every person who expresses
concerns about the success of the Semantic Web is a skeptic ("bad guy"
:-).
> managed. For instance, Virtuoso [1], Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, and a
Kingsley, perhaps I'm just grouchy after a long week at work, but I don't
feel this is the proper forum to advertise your company's products. At the
least, you could surely include similar footnotes for Oracle, DB2, and SQL
Server! :-)
> few other RDBMS engines all have the ability to store XML in a myriad of
> ways (internally). The only challenge is to what degree (if any) said
> engines offer RDF & XML Data Management alongside SQL and/or Object
> managment. If we take a multi-model (Hybrid) DBMS like Virtuoso [2]
> [3] for example, there is nothing stopping the use of SPARQL for Graph
> Traversal and then XQuery for post-processing the SPARQL query results
> within the same DBMS server process.
> As per usual with RDF Data Model matters, we start off with "Mutual
> Exclusivity" and end up with "Mutually Inclusive" since RDF and XQuery
> work well together albeit somewhat dependent on architecture your RDF
> Data Management solution.
Yup, I agree with these general approaches, and my colleague and I
discussed them. The discussion actually started surrounding whether or not
there is a distinction between data and metadata, and from there went off
to discuss how XQuery is able to (all-in-one) handle queries across
documents and more structured data as in my original note.
I want to be clear that I don't think this is any sort of failing of the
SW technologies or even of the SW messaging. I thought it was an
interesting viewpoint that I wasn't familiar with, and I think it's good
for the SW community to be familiar with various concerns--especially
those of our friends!
> To conclude, we should start collating "Where Does RDF Fit in Here?"
> type questions in a commonly accessible public Wiki that enables broad
> contribution of solutions pointers and insights etc. We can then use
> this Wiki document as the data source for producing something that's
> similar to your nice SPARQL FAQ [4]
I agree with this also. I'll try to get some of these thoughts summarized
onto the wiki sometime next week.
Lee
> Links:
>
> 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuoso_Universal_Server
> 2. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/architect/vconcept.htm (Conceptual
> Architecture Diagram)
> 3. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/architect/vtechnical.htm (Technical
> Architecture Diagram)
> 4. http://thefigtrees.net/lee/sw/sparql-faq
>
> --
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> President & CEO
> OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
>
>
>
>
Received on Saturday, 9 December 2006 00:59:31 UTC