Triplr down. Thoughts on Distributed RDFization

Hi All,

Sorry if everyone is asking the same thing.
Triplr went missing this weekend ( at least to us folks down in LatAm ).

I believe triplr to be an *incredibly* smart and useful service (
especially callback wrapped JSON ). It will probably do more in behalf
of the semantic web, outreach-wise, than most other efforts out there
( once it finds its way into small widgets and tutorials with
practical applications ).

But, with great power comes great responsibility.

This outage crippled several demos I was planting out in the wild, and
the perceive damage is rather huge. "The Semantic Web is Down??" I got
from a couple of High level execs. Of course there are no SLAs and no
commitment on triplr's behalf, but the ( naive and irresponsible )
expectation is that the service doesn't break.

I agree this is the developer's mistake but then again, the value
proposition was to make it easier for them to play around with SW
data.

This brings up the some FUD from the consumer's perspective.
And then the same can be argued from the service provider's POV:

If someone builds a scutter on top of Triplr, for example, and tries
to index the entire foaf-space, numbers can get big.

What are the rules?
Should they enforce some sort of limits?
Who's paying for infrastructure?
( Dave? )

Etc...

I am now changing all these small demos to fallback to an alternative
proxy ( my own, running powered by virtuoso running on the cloud )
and/or OpenLink hosted Demo endpoints.

My question is:

Has anyone given deeper thought to this issue?

For example. How about a Pay per use proxy service ( akin to Amazon S3
) using signed headers that could be financially viable and provide a
SLA?
( and more complex services, like delegated auth and session management ).

Or perhaps a directory of open (and/or payed) rdf-izer services that
shared the same REST interface and could be swapped. Triplr, OpenLink
demo, etc.

( of course the latter brings up trust issues and whatnot, but we can
factor those in as well ).

The point is that RDFization of heterogeneous resources will remain a
complex ( and evolving ) topic and a reliable simplification layer is
definitely beneficial.

Thanks,
A

-- 
:::: Aldo Bucchi ::::
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Received on Monday, 8 September 2008 16:13:28 UTC