RDF View over Oracle HR Demo DB Example

All,

As I continue my quest to expose simple answers to the question: What is 
the value accorded by RDF based Linked Data that isn't deliverable via 
tradiation SQL RDBMS technology, here is a live example of a Virtuoso 
RDF View atop the Oracle sample HR DB via an HTML page at:
http://demo.openlinksw.com/about/html/http://demo.openlinksw.com/oraclehr/employees/105

What does this do demonstrate specifically?

1. Access to a negotiated representation of the description (attributes 
& relationship graph) of the entity: 
<http://demo.openlinksw.com/oraclehr/employees/105#this>,  via any HTTP 
compatible user agent

2. Navigation of the entity relationship graph via any HTTP compatible 
user agent

3. The ability to enrich the entity relationship graph without touching 
the source Oracle DBMS or the underlying schema ; anyone can make a 
statement about <http://demo.openlinksw.com/oraclehr/employees/105#this> 
in their own HTTP accessible data space and optionally link back via 
<owl:sameAs>, <rdfs:seeAlso>, and other relationship oriented properties.

Note: the relationships in the current demo are limited, there are 
obvious inverse links that will be added to the RDF View that drives 
this demo.

Going back to traditional SQL data access. It is important to remember 
that native CLIs, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB etc., are unable to 
deliver the conceptual level and open access I refer to above for the 
following (hopefully obvious) reasons:

1. They are language or platform specific
2. Identity and Naming is scoped to the data container (sets) rather 
than record level
3. Data representation is data access protocol specific (at best).

What is good for entity: 
<http://demo.openlinksw.com/oraclehr/employees/105#this> is good for any 
record tethered by a traditional RDBMS engine.

Of course none of this invalidates the utility of the traditional RDBMS, 
it simply reflects the fact that the apex of the data access and data 
management pyramid is shifting from the logical RDBMS level to the 
conceptual Entity level -- exemplified by the Entity-Attribute-Value + 
Classes & Relationships + HTTP based Identifiers approach delivered by 
RDF based Linked Data.

As stated in my earlier posts, what I am demonstrating here using Oracle 
also applies and works for all ODBC or JDBC accessible RDBMS engines. 
Thus, it would be nice for collateral from this incubator group to 
include simple examples using demo schemas from across the RDBMS spectrum.


-- 


Regards,

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

Received on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 03:03:12 UTC