RE: RDF tools as workhorse

Hi William:

Very good point and frankly an open research question. However, not all
triples will reside on one machine; they will be likely distributed across
the globe same as Web resources are distributed among servers. 

My prediction is that a lot of those triples will even not be exposed to the
general public as data, but will be only accessible to server-side software
that in turn exposes its functionality as a Semantic Web service to the
world. 

But even on a small scale, and that is the interesting thing for me in this
thread, RDF offers a lot of advantages, since it removes the burden of
agreeing upon one consensual data schema prior to storing facts; it frees us
from the limitation of controlled schema evolution. In RDBMS, dealing with
any change in the data schema is burdensome and usually intrusive, while in
RDF you can add new aspects (i.e. new properties) without changing the
existing collection of facts.


Martin

---------------------------
martin.hepp@deri.org, phone: +43 512 507 6465
http://www.heppnetz.de / http://www.deri.org

-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of William Loughborough
Sent: Mittwoch, 14. September 2005 14:52
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: RDF tools as workhorse


Jeen Broekstra wrote:
> ...I'd say that if your primary concern is query performance then 
> perhaps using a triple store is not the way to go...

Excuse a lurker's naivete, but I've been under the impression that the whole
point of this entire RDF/triples exercise is to deal with a MUCH LARGER set
of data than is envisioned in this thread, i.e. the entire Semantic Web
taken as one big database.

The proprietary ("enterprise" is the usual buzzword) considerations are of
much less concern to humanity since what's needed is some more universal
everyone/everything/everywhere/always connected sort of thing.

Finding out how many tires are in stock in Akron is an extremely small part
of the overall point - am I missing something?

Love.

Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 13:16:01 UTC