Re: [tangle] getting the semweb exactly wrong

On Wednesday 04 January 2006 20:03, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> One answer is: don't!  The SemWeb is about conecting the data to what
>   it means.
> Keep the data in the place where it works and runs fast.

Actually, I wouldn't dismiss it so fast. On the border between Perl-land 
and Redland there has been much experimenting lately with using a 
Redland model and toolchain as the model of a Model-View-Controller, 
and from the reports I've heard this has been successful. 
Unfortunately, many of the details are under NDA's so I haven't got 
them, but I did some experiments with my own Redland-based SPARQL 
engine, and the results where "OKish", some SPARQL queries against the 
Redland model where not substantially slower than querying the RDBMS 
for the same using the underlying engine. Others weren't as good, but I 
didn't experiment enough to understand what the issues could be. 

I think modelling the data as RDF and use a Redland model for the model 
of the MVC is emerging as a very interesting architecture for web apps, 
at least for smaller or medium sized applications with a few million 
triples (which is the range I've worked in). This has the added benefit 
that the whole app is trivially semweb, and therefore that the model 
can be anywhere and anything, the model is the web. I have about two 
lines of code of a album app I will build this way... :-) I'm sure the 
Java world might feel the same about their tools. 

However, it is clear that there exists relatively little experience 
around this and that if one goes with it, itrequires a lot of 
experimentation. I would therefore not argue that any approach is to be 
preferred over the other, but I would certainly be interested in 
hearing from people who try. I think the main performance challenge 
will be to cache the results of common queries and connected to 
validating the cache.

Cheers,

Kjetil
--
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2006 20:13:25 UTC