Re: [ANNOUNCE] IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform Release

Hi Steve,

Thanks very much for your interest.

We think that being able to revert to a particular version of a named graph
is a very powerful idea. It gives you the ability to keep an audit trail to
see what changes from version to version. We also have all of the data
necessary to be able to reconstruct the state of the store at any point in
the past, but that has not been exposed through an API yet. Revision
tracking also makes client replication easier from a development viewpoint.

The requirement originally came from some work we have done with the life
sciences community. One very specific application of this comes from our
work with CViT [1] (For more information, see the presentations page [2]).
We are building a research tool to manage digital information; in
particular, everything revolving around in silico experiments. We want to
store everything: workflow for running computational simultations and
rendering images based on the output data, linked to the input values (and
the literature references that they come from), output data and images at
every stage of the process, and code for a particular implementation of an
algorithm. As things change (algorithm source code, input values, etc), new
versions are generated. So when a scientist goes off to a conference
several months after the paper is published (and grad students have been
hacking away madly, trying new things, replacing old chunks of code), and a
colleague asks how a particular data set was generated, everything
necessary to re-run the simulation will be contained in an old version of
the graph or graphs representing the whole process.

While this example is in the life sciences domain, it's pretty easy to
apply it to others as well.

[1] http://www.cvit.org/
[2] http://www.cvit.org/node/69

Wing Yung
Internet Technology
wingyung@us.ibm.com
617.693.3763


                                                                           
             Steve Cassidy                                                 
             <Steve.Cassidy@mq                                             
             .edu.au>                                                   To 
                                       Wing C Yung/Cambridge/IBM@IBMUS     
             11/30/2006 10:43                                           cc 
             PM                        semantic-web@w3.org                 
                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: [ANNOUNCE] IBM Semantic Layered 
                                       Research Platform Release           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Wing C Yung wrote:
> Our group at IBM Cambridge has open-sourced our Semantic Web projects.
> Check it out: IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform [1] (with
> documentation [2] and downloads [3]). Lee Feigenbaum has written about
our
> motivations [4] and roadmap [5].
>
> Boca, our enterprise-ready RDF store, is the only component that has been
> officially released; others are still works in development. Matthew Roy's
> post [6] covers its most important features, including named graph
support,
> client replication, security, revision history, and real-time
notification.
>

I wonder if you have any more information on your thoughts on revision
histories for RDF triple stores? I find some notes on how your
implementation works on the wiki but I'm interested in what you think
the motivations and potential applications are for this.

Any pointers welcomed.

Steve Cassidy

Received on Friday, 1 December 2006 13:31:41 UTC