R2RML practicability concerns

Dear all,

unfortunately there was not time today during the telco to raise this 
concern, that is why now by email:

When looking at the example I notice, that the relational tables 
definition would be very concise (~15 lines). The R2RML mapping, 
however, is very verbose and takes probably 5 times more space.

I'm really afraid, that R2RML will be very impractical and has a quite 
steep learning curve. Even if you have user interfaces which automatize 
the generation of R2RML, these will have to be understood and modified 
manually as soon as the DB schema changes. From that perspective, the 
current draft appears to be quite impractical.

Suggestion: do you think it would be possible to follow a convention 
over configuration approach and only require the user to configure 
something in case he wants to alter the default behaviour. For example, 
an rr:Table2TriplesMap based on an rr:logicalTable could be mapped based 
on reasonable assumptions and maybe a default mapping of DB datatypes to 
XML-Schema datatypes, instead of having to configure every 
rr:propertyObjectMaps in addition for every column.

I think simplifying things is really crucial, if we want the standard to 
be quickly and widely adopted.

Best,

Sören

Received on Tuesday, 5 October 2010 23:16:24 UTC