Re: Question about doing RDF analysis in Ruby

Thanks to everyone who responded.  I'm slowly getting up the learning curve.

Best regards,

Greg Lappen

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@kellogg-assoc.com>wrote:

> These are fairly generic questions, and you might want to re-post it to
> SemanticOverflow, for example.
>
> On Jan 31, 2011, at 8:15 PM, Greg Lappen wrote:
>
> > I thought of a couple more questions while I was out and about:
> >
> > 1)  It's fairly common to design applications with an RDBMS (and now
> document-based and key-value) data stores, and then serving that data in
> various formats (html, xml, json, csv, etc.).  Obviously RDF could just be
> another of these formats.  Or you could use RDF as your primary data model
> (and data store).  Are there some guidelines or "rules of thumb" that are
> out there to help decide which path to take?
>
> From my perspective, RDF offers several advanatages over traditional DBMS
> systems:
>
> * Data is normalized to triples (or quads),
> * DB can provide specific support for RDF queries,
> * No "impedance mis-match" in going between representations.
>
> >
> > 2)  Everywhere I read about the semantic web and RDF, it talks about how
> you can combine different data sets and derive new data (inferences) - has
> anyone had experience with building systems that can answer questions that
> users come up with at runtime (using SPARQL queries?), or is this mostly
> done by writing programs?
>
> There are a number of different open-source inference engines. Notation-3
> has reasoning built in (not yet in the Ruby implementation). See, for
> example CWM [1]. SPARQL, too, can be used for limited reasoning, as it is
> not naturally chaining. Reasoning ultimately becomes an exercise in
> Artificial Intelligence, with inference logic such as that expressed in
> OWL/RDFS, forming the basis of higher-level operations. See [2] for some
> more information.
>
> The Semantic Web Application Platform  (SWAP) suite [3] has a number of
> uses of performing inference using CWM in Notation-3. See, for example, [4].
>
> > Just looking for some general info as there's a lot of academic articles
> out there, and a lot of books, and I want to know what I should be trying to
> learn.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Greg
>
> Gregg
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_reasoner
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/
> [4] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/grammar/first_follow.n3