Re: [tangle] getting the semweb exactly wrong

Frank,

there's a lot of value in your reply which I hope to be able to  
address tomorrow. Just a quick comment now:

On Jan 3, 2006, at 11:12 PM, Frank Manola wrote:

> Anyway, I think the trade-offs involved in using RDF in the  
> Semantic Web are reasonable ones.  But I think sometimes that the  
> differences with prior work (including work prior to the relational  
> model) are sometimes exaggerated.

I think that the most important question to be answered is this:

What problems that I today have with the relational model would be  
better addressed if I used RDF+OWL?

IOW, what is the killer argument for abandoning my RDBMS and using an  
RDF store instead?

I think the (killer?) argument is evolvability and the standard use  
case is a company having some hundreds of report creating 'scripts'  
stuffed with SQL statements and thus a deadly dependency on the  
relational database schema in use. Assuming 1 to 5 man days to  
migrate each report evolving the schema becomes next to impossible  
leading to zero evolvability.

How would the situation be different if the hundreds of reports  
depended on RDF schemas (and OWL ontologies) instead?

Or: how would the use of RDF/OWL (as opposed to an RDBMS schema)  
enable what one might call 'late binding between query and data  
model" so that the data model could evolve wiothout breaking the  
queries?

Jan







________________________________________________________________________ 
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Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer                         
http://jalgermissen.com
Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT'   
http://www.tugboat.de

Received on Tuesday, 3 January 2006 22:49:07 UTC