Re: FW: Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo

On 11/24/10 7:47 AM, William Waites wrote:
> Friedrich, I'm forwarding your message to one of the W3 lists.
>
> Some of your questions could be easily answered (e.g. for euro in your
> context, you don't have a predicate for that, you have an Observation
> with units of a currency and you could take the currency from
> dbpedia, the predicate is "units").
>
> But I think your concerns are quite valid generally and your
> experience reflects that of most web site developers that encounter
> RDF.
>
> LOD list, Friedrich is a clueful developer, responsible for
> http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ amongst other things. What can we
> learn from this? How do we make this better?
>
> -w
>
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Friedrich Lindenberg<friedrich@pudo.org>  -----
>
> From: Friedrich Lindenberg<friedrich@pudo.org>
> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:56:20 +0100
> Message-Id:<A9089567-6107-4B43-B442-D09DCC0C353D@pudo.org>
> To: wdmmg-discuss<wdmmg-discuss@lists.okfn.org>
> Subject: [wdmmg-discuss] Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo
>
> (reposting to list):
>
> Hi all,
>
> As an action from OGDCamp, Rufus and I agreed that we should resume porting WDMMG to RDF in order to make the data model more flexible and to allow a merger between WDMMG, OffenerHaushalt and similar other projects.
>
> After a few days, I'm now over the whole idea of porting WDMMG to RDF. Having written a long technical pro/con email before (that I assume contained nothing you don't already know), I think the net effect of using RDF would be the following:
>
> * Lots of coolness, sucking up to linked data people.
> * Further research regarding knowledge representation.
>
> vs.
>
> * Unstable and outdated technological base. No triplestore I have seen so far seemed on par with MySQL 4.
> * No freedom wrt to schema, instead modelling overhead. Spent 30 minutes trying to find a predicate for "Euro".
> * Scares off developers. Invested 2 days researching this, which is how long it took me to implement OHs backend the first time around. Project would need to be sustained through linked data grad students.
> * Less flexibility wrt to analytics, querying and aggregation. SPARQL not so hot.
> * Good chance of chewing up the UI, much harder to implement editing.
>
> I normally enjoy learning new stuff. This is just painful. Most of the above points are probably based on my ignorance, but it really shouldn't take a PhD to process some gov spending tables.
>
> I'll now start a mongo effort because I really think this should go schema-free + I want to get stuff moving. If you can hold off loading Uganda and Israel for a week that would of course be very cool, we could then try to evaluate how far this went. Progress will be at: http://bitbucket.org/pudo/wdmmg-core
>
> Friedrich
>
>
>
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> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
Friedrich,

Which Triple or Quad stores have you tested. Your MySQL 4 assertion 
doesn't compute.

MySQL is a Relational Database, it doesn't compare to even a moderately 
capable RDF Triple or Quad store (Relational Property Graph Databases 
that support URI based Keys) when it comes to:

1. Heterogenously sourced data
2. Disparately shaped data
3. Volatile Schema.

Is your data available as a dump?

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen