- From: John Erickson <olyerickson@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 08:12:59 -0500
- To: Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org>
- Cc: Paul Houle <ontology2@gmail.com>, W3C LOD Mailing List <public-lod@w3.org>
This is not crazy, just a bit insane ;) OLE structured storage is analogous to XML; indeed, it is in many ways a binary precursor to XML. You're biggest problem will be that it represents structure and not relationships; "converting" information packed in OLE-SS into sensible RDF presents the same challenges as converting an arbitrary XML document. Yuck... To do it you need a target information model for generating the RDF. You need to ask if you really must convert all of the data or simply the metadata (ie the "properties"). If you only (or, at least, at first) focus on the metadata, there is potentially much you can do. Also, since Office structures are well known, you might make some progress into the data itself. But yuck... Why not just save out the documents as Office XML and convert that way? Still painful, but there are plenty of code examples (c.f. LibreOffice) John On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org> wrote: > Thanks Paul, >> On 15 Dec 2014, at 19:07, Paul Houle <ontology2@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Most Windows programmers would instantiate OLE objects in the applications and query them to get results; > Ah, the first problem - I'm not a Windows programmer :-) > In fact, I want to access OLE-published stuff without any need to have knowledge of Windows at all. > http resolution to IIS or Apache running on the Windows machine seemed like a good choice. >> commonly people write XML or JSON APIs, but writing RDF wouldn't be too different. >> >> The next step up is to have a theory that converts OLE data structures to and from RDF either in general or in a specific case with help from a schema. Microsoft invested a lot in making SOAP work well with OLE, so you might do best with a SOAP to RDF mapping. > So yes - a service that did some mapping from the retrieved OLE data structure to RDF; and a general one was what I was thinking of. > > The incoming URI would be interpretable as an OLE data object (I guess with some server config), which then got fetched and converted to RDF. > In fact, it seems an obvious way of exposing Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and even Access DBs live, but there is probably some stuff I don't understand that means it is crazy. > > I suspect the silence (except you and Barry) means that this isn't something anyone has done, at least yet. > > Best > Hugh >> >> This caught my eye though, because I've been looking at the relationships between RDF and OMG, a distant outpost of standardization. You can find competitive products on the market, one based on UML and another based on RDF, OWL, SKOS and so forth. The products do more or less the same thing, but described in such different language and vocabulary that it's hard to believe that they compete for any sales. >> >> There is lots of interesting stuff there, but the big theme is ISO Common logic, which adds higher-arity predicates and a foundation for inference that people will actually want to use. It's not hard to convince the "enterprise" that first-order-logic is ready for the big time because banks and larger corporations all use FOL-based systems on production rules to automate decisions. >> >> >> >> On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org> wrote: >> Anyone know of any work around exposing OLE linked objects as RDF? >> I could envisage a proxy that gave me URIs and metadata for embedded objects. >> >> Is that even a sensible question? :-) >> >> -- >> Hugh Glaser >> 20 Portchester Rise >> Eastleigh >> SO50 4QS >> Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155, Home: +44 23 8061 5652 >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Paul Houle >> Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF >> (607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype ontology2@gmail.com >> http://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup > > -- > Hugh Glaser > 20 Portchester Rise > Eastleigh > SO50 4QS > Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155, Home: +44 23 8061 5652 > > > -- John S. Erickson, Ph.D. Deputy Director, Web Science Research Center Tetherless World Constellation (RPI) <http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com> Twitter & Skype: olyerickson
Received on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 13:13:27 UTC