Hello and Introduction

Hello all,  I am Chimezie Ogbuji, but I mostly go by Chime (chee-meh).  I'm the Lead Systems Analyst in the Cardiothoracic and Surgery Research department of the Cleveland Clinic. My role in this department is technological oversight, software architecture, design and deployment of an ongoing project to replace a very dated but valuable Cardiovascular Information Registry.  The registry was originally a relational database is targeted for deployment using XML and RDF (dually) for represention.

To facilitate dual representation we use 4Suite and XSLT, and thus our interest in GRDDL.  My personal interest has to do with my prior experience with the mapping mechanism used in 4Suite's content repository (called document definitions) to associate not only validation mechanisms with XML documents in a repository, but also with a mapping to RDF.  The mapping was persistent, in that any updates to the XML document triggered the evaluation of the mapping and updated the entire contents of a named graph with the consequent RDF triples.  The name of the graph by default was the URI / path of the XML document in the repository.

The mappings were expressed either as XSLT or using an XML-based host language that associated XPaths (evaluated against the source document) with the three terms in an RDF statement.  This was meant as a less expressive but more easily composed mapping and as an alternative to using the full expressiveness of XSLT.

The most important value in such a dual representation mechanism was that the mapping could be fashioned such that the RDF store essentially becomes a semantic index of XML content for queries *across* the database, reducing the need to rely on native XML persistence for database-wide querying.  Follow-up XML queries / transformations can be then be applied on XML documents identified by cross-database RDF queries.  We developed mappings for some of the more common XML dialects (now called microformats) such as Dublin Core and Docbook.  

We also use the mapping mechanism to reflect file-system-like RDF metadata about resources in the repository (somewhat analogous to a File Alocation Table), so RDF and XML in tandem are were used to manage 4Suite's virtual filesystem.  We ran into some issues of how such a mapping could be made as declarative as possible and I hope such issues may be addressed with the work we do with GRDDL.  The parallels are obvious.

I think there is great potential for such mappings both in extracting RDF content from XML on the web as well as from XML in somewhat controlled systems, and look forward to working on GRDDL to help make it a protocol for both scenarios.

I do plan on implementing GRDDL in the RDF libraries I use and hope to help in anyway I can (my primary interest is in editing, testing, and deployment advocacy) with what I think will be a very important aspect in how RDF content is managed and extracted. 

I'm based out of Shaker Heights, OH and am generally available for conference calls (with appropriate heads-up) except for Mondays and Tuesdays, due to teleconference obligations in the other group(s) I participate in.

The best way to contact me is by email or IRC (I'm often on #swig / #4suite / #redfoot on freenode).  My primary email addresses are:

work: ogbujic@ccf.org
home: chimezie@gmail.com
blog: http://copia.ogbuji.net

Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

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