- From: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:46:23 +0200
- To: SWIG SWIG <semantic-web@w3.org>
I just posted this: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bblfish/20051009 Web 2: know your end user I have had a few questions regarding SPARQL where people are misunderstanding the intended end user of this technology. Clearly the end user of a SPARQL end point is not your mom and pops, who would need a point and click interface on a device adapted to their needs. No, the end user are developers. By making your database available through a SPARQL end point you are allowing software developers to create very powerful apps from your data that may in different ways help grow your business. This is what Web 2 is all about. Here are a few examples. Imagine you are Amazon.com. You know that you don't have the resources to think of all the different ways you can sell your products. By making your catalog available for query in such a general way you give some clever programmer a way perhaps to create a tool that will end up helping you sell your goods, be they books, CDs, electronic equipment or any of the other numerous things amazon makes available. Amazon allready does this with their web services. SPARQL would just allow them to generalise on that, by making the query interface much more flexible, and dramatically reduce the bandwidth required to extract information from their database. Imgine that your are imdb, the amazingly useful Internet Movie database. By making all the movie collection available trough SPARQL you give some entrepreneurial programmer out there the opportunity to create services that you had never yourself considered, or would never have been able to put together yourself, as that service may require bringing data together from disparate sources that you don't control. If this new service that makes use of your data is successful, you will see it in your logs, the creator of the service will want quality of service guarantees so that he can satisfy his own clients, and he may end up paying you some money for that guarantee. Imagine your are running the French railways and you make all your time table info available this way. Other travel services could use this information to help people organize trips automatically, and so use your trains more often. Others could write some small apps specifically aimed at a particular audience whose aims and habits they understand well, again increasing the usage of the railway in the process. Imagine you are a hotel chain. Here again the travel agencies could find out if your rooms are available, and send you customers... When GPS enabled phones become widely available programmers will be able to integrate this information to help owners of cell phones locate a hotel closest to them that has rooms to their liking. If you are big or have information that is valuable you can create your own ontology by yourself. If you are smaller you can be the first to do it, and others will likely follow. Otherwise you can work together with partners in your industry to create an ontology that reflects the objects your business is about. The beauty of SPARQL is that all the developer needs to know is your ontology, and he will know how to query your service. SPARQL does not deal with the booking part of it, for sure. That is where another technology will have to take the relay. But it need not be very complicated. A link pointing the user to a "buy" or "book" form would be enough for many cases. Henry Story
Received on Sunday, 9 October 2005 22:47:39 UTC