Re: Playing with sets in OWL...

On Sep 10, 2006, at 8:21 AM, Marco Brandizi wrote:

> - ...how much are RDF and OWL scalable? Let's take a small data set  
> of 100 microarray experiments, with 10k probe sets x 10  
> hybridiazations. We would have (at least) 10 millions numbers to  
> handle, plus several annotations, plus inference, etc. An RDF  
> backend that directly maps SQL to RDF should still work out, but  
> what about an in-memory OWL reasoner? And what about integrating  
> larger amounts of microarray data, crawled from different sources  
> on the web (which should be a goal of the Semantic web)?

Will not scale in-memory at the moment, though I haven't experimented  
with pellet using 64bit java and gobs of memory.

Instance store is a relational backend for OWL instances with limited  
kinds of reasoning and query support.   http:// 
instancestore.man.ac.uk/, http://instancestore.sourceforge.net/ .  
There is a new version being worked on - if you are interested in  
trying to work with them, then I can look up the contact.

Also there is Oracle's RDF store, which will start to have some OWL  
reasoning features in the near future.

Reminder: Open world means you only need to actually represent  
explicitly what you will need for your computation (and to convey  
it's meaning to the outside world).

> That's another point of current state-of-art of the Semantic Web: I  
> am not an expert, but aren't we still missing some needed features?  
> Like: efficient RDF handling, SQL mapping, federated data stores,  
> distributed reasoning... relational tehory is less expressive, but  
> for the moment, relational databases, having been here for ages,  
> seem more reliable and efficient.

Yes. These are early days. Welcome to the frontier :)

The hope is that the investment we make now will lead to greater and  
more effective sharing of knowledge, and to surprising discoveries  
enabled by making it much easier to get, understand, and integrate  
knowledge/data than it currently is.

-Alan

Received on Monday, 11 September 2006 23:24:45 UTC