Re: semantic data models

On 23/12/2007, editor@content-wire.com <editor@content-wire.com> wrote:

> Most of  the conceptual thinking behind semantic data was done in the
> eighties
> Things have moved on a little in the last ten years or so,  but not so much

...if you discount Semantic Web technologies ;-)

> questions:
>
> - other than SIM, prototypes like Hstore and some semantic data wrapper,
> what tools can I use to implement semantic data?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original notion of semantic
data was the overlay of ontology kind of ideas over an
entity-relationship kind of model. There's been a great deal of work
done since around Description Logics (which offer formalisations of
ontologies) and the Resource Description Framework offers an
entity-relationship model designed for the Web. Put these together,
with a few other bits and pieces and you have Semantic Web
technologies.

> - when modelling data, usually we follow standard 'data modelling' methods
> based on relational data model. what parts of our methods do we have to
> upldate to develop semantic data model?

Depends how semantic you want to get. Down at the RDF level, you can
just normalise the data down to binary relations (and name the
relations with URIs). This can be done as a view of the relational
data. The SPARQL query language can be used on such data, and because
of the use of URIs as identifiers it's inherently Web-friendly.

If you want more sophisticated reasoning over the data, you'll need to
find or create OWL ontologies in which your data fits.

> - As a project manager in charge of making sure that my organisation's data
> model is 'semantic enabled' what should I absolutely make sure of?

Depends what you want to do with the data. I'd suggest exposing an RDF
view of the data, reusing existing RDF schemas/ontologies wherever
possible. See the specs listed at:

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

also:

http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/

To make it useful internally, you may want to check out some of the
available tools, e.g. at:

http://www.mkbergman.com/?page_id=325
http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/toolkits/
http://planetrdf.com/guide/

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Monday, 24 December 2007 13:41:08 UTC