RDF tools as workhorse

Hi all,

Does anyone on the list have some real-world stories to share about 
using RDF and its tools as a backend technology?  The company I work 
for maintains a database of metadata.  I'd like to explore using RDF 
instead of our current schemas.

For example:   I have a lot of data about books.  I'd like to translate 
the data into RDF/XML and dump it into an RDF database.  Then, taking a 
particular book, I'd like to query the database to extract related 
information like: other books by the same author, other books with the 
same subject code, etc.

My concerns relate to:
1) Performance -- Right now we query the database using SQL.  Sometimes 
it is _very_ slow.  That's mainly because the data is distributed 
across tables and there are a lot of joins going on.  It seems like 
using RDF would allow us to use simple queries.

2) Scalability -- Our triplestore would be HUGE.  I'd estimate 10-20 
Million triples.  Is that small or large in RDF circles?

3) Productivity -- It's usually easier for me to envision creating RDF 
from our source data than massaging the data to fit into our database 
schema.  The same goes for when I'm extracting data - it seems like it 
would be much easier to express my query as a triple using wildcards 
for the data I want.

Any information will be helpful.  I'm interested in learning from other 
peoples' experiences.

Thanks,
Mark

..oO  Mark Donoghue
..oO  e: mark@ThirdStation.com
..oO  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1570/m.donoghue

Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 04:52:35 UTC