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

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Rob Styles <rob.styles@talis.com> wrote:
> 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?


That's exactly the approach we took in http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes
and on http://ww.bbc.co.uk/music/beta. We  publish linked data by
"just" writing a new view in a Ruby-on-Rails-like framework. The cost
of doing that is really, really extremely low if your web application
is well designed (well designed = one URI per thing). I think most web
developers getting the "the website is the API" slogan know exactly
what to do.

Cheers!
y

>
> rob
>
>
> Rob Styles
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Received on Monday, 9 February 2009 14:46:03 UTC