Re: Semantic Web pneumonia and the Linked Data flu (was: Can we lower the LD entry cost please (part 1)?)

On 9 Feb 2009, at 14:16, Juan Sequeda wrote:

> Of course... but even though. IMO, not easy enough! I'm taking the  
> position as owner of one of the million web applications out there,  
> powered by a rdbms, and now hearing about the LD thing going on. If  
> I want to be part of it... I would have to invest a lot of time and  
> effort with existing tools such as d2r sever, etc...

It seems to me that the data in an rdbms is often structured in ways  
that are designed to be efficient for the rdbms to manage rather than  
in ways that make sense externally. Levels of normalisation are the  
main thing I'm thinking of. LD is most widely useful at 5th Normal  
Form, but then there are tradeoffs that usually lead to an rdbms  
schema being more like 3NF.

Isn't the effort in publishing LD the same effort that one expends  
getting the data from the rdbms into HTML today, but that the data  
needs to be in RDF? When doing that don't tradeoffs in the schema have  
to be reconciled through queries that join from several tables or that  
select distinct entries in particular columns? Isn't that what Drupal  
and Ruby-n-Rails and so on are optimised to do?

I agree with the notion of lowering the barrier and Virtuoso's mapping  
stuff is really interesting, but is the cost really that high right  
now? Isn't it just the same as writing some dynamic web pages?

rob


Rob Styles
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Received on Monday, 9 February 2009 14:34:25 UTC