- From: Sören Auer <auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
- Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:39:12 -0400
- To: semantic_web@googlegroups.com
- CC: "revi s." <reviswami78@yahoo.com>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
From my point of view (next to the distribution aspect) flexibility is a crucial difference between the RDF based Semantic Web representation techniques and databases: With databases schema changes are very time consuming operations - the whole repository and keys have to be reorganized. Triple stores on the contrary don't distinguish between data changes and ontology schema changes - both are finally just additions or deletions of triples. However, triple stores will probably never be able to compete with optimized database schemas with respect to query speed. So if you need high speed querying and you don't expect many schema changes use a RDBMS, if you want to be very flexible with your schema/ontology use a triple store. The RDF paradigm is also a bit more holistic in the sense that everything from data, schema to metadata is encoded in triples, while databases usually have different encoding techniques for each of these. Regards, Sören
Received on Tuesday, 29 August 2006 14:39:56 UTC