Size matters -- How big is the danged thing

So I've been to a number of talks lately where the size of the current  
(Sept 08 diagram) Linked Open Data cloud, in triples, has been stated  
- with numbers that vary quite widely.  The esw wiki says 2B triples  
as of 2007, which isn't very useful given the growth we've seen in the  
past year -- I've also seen the various blog posts and mail threads  
saying why we shouldn't cit meaningless numbers and such - but  
frankly, I've recently been on a bunch of panels with DB guys, and I'd  
love to have a reasonable number to quote -- anyone have a good  
estimate of the size of the danged thing (number of triples in the  
whole as an RDF graph would be nice) -- would also be nice for general  
audiences where big numbers tend to impress and for research purposes  
(for example, we know how far we can compress the triples for an in  
memory approach we are playing with, but we want to figure out how  
much memory we need for the whole cloud - we want to know if we need  
to shell out for the 16G iphone)
  anyway, if anyone has a decent estimate, or even a smart educated  
guess, I'd love to hear it
  JH



"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would  
it?." - Albert Einstein

Prof James Hendler				http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
Tetherless World Constellation Chair
Computer Science Dept
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY 12180

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2008 00:07:57 UTC