Re: a concern on SW technologies: document content

Paul Walsh, Segala wrote:
> Lee,
>
> I wouldn't like to focus any time (at this point) on things that we don't
> know about. 
>
> I think you're concerns are well placed, but not for this group to address
> at this time IMHO. I propose we pick the low hanging fruit by demonstrating
> the real benefits with implementations that are out there today. Then we can
> focus on implementations in progress...  
>
> ***Enough research!!*** More outreach!! ;)
>
> Kind regards,
> Paul
>   

Paul,

Wouldn't categorize this question as "High Hanging" fruit :-)

What I think we could do with these kinds of questions is place them in 
a "Presumed" or  "Assumed" Challenges Wiki document.

Lee: my response to your piece follows below:
>
> Hi SWEOids,
>
> Wing and I had an interesting and somewhat enlightening conversation with 
> another IBMer today. Our colleague was somewhat familiar with the SW world 
> and is very familiar with the XML world, and he expressed concerns that SW 
> technologies (and RDF / SPARQL in particular) may fall short in one 
> prominent area in which XML / XQuery shines: dealing with content-oriented 
> (often mixed content) documents. He was concerned about this given some of 
> our claims about the value of RDF/SW technologies as a unifying 
> environment for data and metadata.
>
> He gave various examples ranging from insurance policies to resumes to 
> rentral agreements, with the basic idea being that XQuery can easily 
> answer questions that involve searching within a document (or, more-so, 
> searching for text in a particular paragraph of a document, perhaps with 
> emphasis added) which uses XML markup. He wondered aloud and we discussed 
> what the SW approach to this would be, and we agreed that it's lacking 
> right now. He expressed worry that whereas XML can wrap data that might be 
> best expressed as relational or RDF data (and then join that data in 
> XQuery queries with document data), the RDF world may not have as nice a 
> story.
>
> I (personally) need to think the issues here through a bit more, but to me 
> it was not an objection that I've heard commonly, but it was an 
> interesting one to which I had no immediate response, so I wanted to throw 
> it out here and solicit thoughts and/or feedback. (I don't think it's 
> imperative that we have an immediate or bulletproof response to every 
> potential SW objection, but thinking about where the technologies fall 
> short in addition to where they excel should help us craft our messaging.)
>
> have a good weekend everyone,
> Lee
>
>
>
>   
The question posed by the XQuery / XML enthusiast (and obvious RDF 
skeptic) makes too many assumptions about how, and where, RDF is 
managed. For instance, Virtuoso [1], Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, and a 
few other RDBMS engines all have the ability to store XML in a myriad of 
ways (internally). The only challenge is to what degree (if any) said 
engines offer RDF & XML Data Management alongside SQL and/or Object 
managment.   If we take a multi-model (Hybrid) DBMS  like Virtuoso [2] 
[3] for example, there is nothing stopping the use of SPARQL for Graph 
Traversal and then XQuery for post-processing the SPARQL query results 
within the same DBMS server process.

As per usual with RDF Data Model matters, we start off with "Mutual 
Exclusivity" and  end up with  "Mutually Inclusive" since RDF and XQuery 
work well together albeit somewhat dependent on architecture your RDF 
Data Management solution.

To conclude, we should start collating "Where Does RDF Fit in Here?" 
type questions in a commonly accessible public Wiki that enables broad 
contribution of  solutions pointers and insights etc. We can then use 
this Wiki document as the data source for producing something that's 
similar to your nice SPARQL FAQ [4]

Links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuoso_Universal_Server
2. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/architect/vconcept.htm (Conceptual 
Architecture Diagram)
3. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/architect/vtechnical.htm (Technical 
Architecture Diagram)
4. http://thefigtrees.net/lee/sw/sparql-faq

-- 


Regards,

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

Received on Friday, 8 December 2006 23:15:47 UTC