Re: OODBMS <-> RDF

Dear Pedro,

we have done some work towards a semantic-rich development  
architecture [1]. Our goal was to utilize an OWL/RDF ontology as a  
domain model to be used for software application development.  A  
software tool for generating Enterprise Java Beans, Hibernate  
mappings, and Relational schemas from an ontology is available online  
[2].
More documentation will be eventually available on [3]

Best regards,
Ioannis

[1] Athanasiadis, I.N., Villa, F. & Rizzoli, A.E. (2007). Enabling  
knowledge-based software engineering through semantic-object- 
relational mappings. In 3rd Intl Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled  
Software Engineering, 4th European Semantic Web Conference, pp. 16-30  
(online at: http://swese2007.fzi.de/papers/04.Enabling_KB_SE.pdf)
[2] http://imt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/imt/Thinklab/
[3] http://www.integratedmodelling.org


On 30 Jan 2008, at 10:46, José Pedro Ferreira wrote:

> Dear all,
> Thank you so much for all the suggestions that you promptly provided!
> I'm currently taking a look at the extensive amount of information  
> provided by Elisa and Niklas, and I see that there's already a lot  
> of work in this area, though things are still a bit immature.
> Niklas, I'd really appreciate if you could provide me some  
> information about this python structures <-> rdf transforms provided  
> by oort, since I already have a layer that makes this kind of  
> transformation in order to export JSON. So, maybe it will be useful.
>
> Thanks, once again,
> Cheers,
>
> Pedro
>
>
> Niklas Lindström escreveu:
>> Hi!
>>
>> This is *very* interesting. I am behind Oort [1] (which Jesse
>> mentioned). One of the ideas driving it is to have a mapping *both*
>> back and forth between object and RDF graphs. Since it's Python,  
>> there
>> may be some ground for what you're after. Specifically, Oort today
>> allows you to construct RDF from Python dict/list/atomic value
>> structures [2] (isomorphic to JSON, which you can load directly via
>> simplejson). If you can get these structures from the ZODB, I hope
>> Oort will take you to the RDF you need.
>>
>> A missing piece of the puzzle is generating mappers directly out of
>> OWL schemas (and possibly vice versa). But these mappers also
>> represent queries/aspects, which are more ragged and mixed, so this
>> merits more investigation.
>>
>> ... Going further and beyond...
>>
>> In a wider sense, the Oort ("Out Of RDF Transmogrifying") idea right
>> now is a tiny beginning of what I feel can be a promising way of
>> bridging the gap between RDF and current pragmatic ("less is more")
>> approaches that have emerged, such as microformats and JSON (along
>> with the nascent ideas of schemas for those, as proposed by James
>> Clark [3, 4] and e.g. the Mozilla team [5]). Much of what is  
>> discussed
>> regarding Atom extensions [6] also seem (to me) to point towards a
>> need for formalism "reduction" to fit more narrow contexts (by  
>> which I
>> mostly mean to reuse OWL ontologies in simpler scenarios, where I'm
>> afraid proper RDF continues to be "beyond the horizon").
>>
>> I do think RDF is a "grand unifier" for modelling, but it seems that
>> for many specific contexts, it is viewed as "too formal" to get
>> traction. It's not impossible, but hard, to sell RDF as a perfect
>> match for smaller/local data syndication efforts. This poses the risk
>> of continued reinvention of many things RDF solves very well
>> (precision, I18N, data- and resource typing etc.). I believe that any
>> given context provides assumptions and locality (of terms etc) that
>> makes the decontextualized data which RDF is about *seem*  
>> superfluous.
>> But that next step is then always left unresolved, causing all these
>> integration problems that I assume many of us Semantic Web followers
>> see a solution for in RDF, OWL, SPARQL etc.
>>
>> Basically, I consider simpler representations to be wrapped in  
>> context
>> to reduce formal details, and I am convinced that that can be mapped
>> to the RDF data model rather unobtrusively. How is what I've only
>> begun scratching on the surface of..
>>
>> I've wanted to get the time and energy to pitch this more formally,
>> but haven't gotten around to it much (more than with this message,  
>> and
>> a related blog post [7] last year).
>>
>> Where to go further then? I'd gladly invite you to join
>> <http://groups.google.com/group/oort>, which due to nigh zero  
>> activity
>> I'd happily recast from a python toolkit focus into the more general
>> vision I described above. Not the least since my scope has widened to
>> plans for e.g. a javascript version of the Oort mapper, as well as
>> examination of the Elmo [8] effort from the OpenRDF/Sesame people,
>> which looks very similar to this. Granted, I do not have the
>> experience yet to organize larger community efforts, so perhaps some
>> other form would work better? I'm happy to join any party interested
>> in this.
>>
>> (By analogy, this can be related to things as diverse as the relative
>> merits of dynamic, static and inferred typing in programming, ORMs  
>> for
>> RDBMSs, CouchDB-like technology, etc. Akin to "how to have the cake
>> and eat it too".. I believe we can do this. With insulated layers,
>> each simple and formal, as in many other cases.)
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Niklas
>>
>> [1] <http://oort.to/>
>> [2] <http://oort.to/oort_api/oort.test.test_rdfview-pysrc.html#test_from_dict 
>> >
>> [3] <http://blog.jclark.com/2007/04/do-we-need-new-kind-of-schema-language.html 
>> >
>> [4] <http://blog.jclark.com/2007/04/xml-and-json.html>
>> [5] <http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Describing_microformats_in_JavaScript 
>> >
>> [6] <http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/threads.html#20299>
>> [7] <http://dustfeed.blogspot.com/2007/01/knowledge-bits-and-pieces.html 
>> >
>> [8] <http://openrdf.org/doc/elmo/1.0-beta2/user-guide/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 26, 2008 12:12 AM, Jesse Erdmann <jesse@jesseerdmann.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The only other D2R like software I'm aware of is Squirrel RDF,
>>> http://jena.sourceforge.net/SquirrelRDF/.  I don't know of any  
>>> support
>>> of ZODB.  Is something like RDF Alchemy,
>>> http://www.openvest.com/trac/wiki/RDFAlchemy, or Oort,
>>> http://oort.to/, similar to what you're looking for?
>>>
>>> 2008/1/25 José Pedro Ferreira <jose.pedro.ferreira@cern.ch>:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hello.
>>>> Yes, I know that RDF can be seen as object-oriented. But... I'm not
>>>> considering if it is possible to display OO data using RDF, but  
>>>> rather
>>>> how to make this translation in a smooth, fairly automatic way,  
>>>> without
>>>> having to write enormous amounts of replicated code, and taking
>>>> advantages of the similarities that exist between the two models.  
>>>> It's a
>>>> matter of "translation techniques".
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> Pedro
>>>>
>>>> cdr escreveu:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Fri Jan 25, 2008 at 02:34:28PM +0100, Jos? Pedro Ferreira  
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hello.
>>>>>> I need to make data stored in an object-oriented (ZODB)  
>>>>>> database available
>>>>>> as RDF. I've been looking for existing architectures and mapping
>>>>>> techniques, and eventually found D2RQ
>>>>>> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/D2RQ/spec/>. The problem  
>>>>>> is that
>>>>>> D2RQ seems too much oriented towards the relational paradigm.
>>>>>> Is there any research done on this particular area? I've been  
>>>>>> thinking
>>>>>> about something similar to D2RQ, but object-oriented. However,  
>>>>>> I'd like to
>>>>>> know if there's any work already done about this subject.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> your OOobject is your RDFsubject, your OOobject property is your  
>>>>> RDFpredicate, and your OOobject property's value(s) is/are your  
>>>>> RDFobject(s) (mind the nameclash)
>>>>>
>>>>> your OOobject have URI fields, of course.
>>>>>
>>>>> this also works with JSON.. which can be thought of as an  
>>>>> OOobject serialization, and compatible with RDF so long as your  
>>>>> property-symbols are URIs and each JSONobject has a URI property
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> theyre pretty much identical. even RDFs with its subclassing and  
>>>>> subtyping is an OO model.. replace 'object' with 'resource' in  
>>>>> the literature
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks in advance,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Pedro
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> begin:vcard
>>>>>> fn:Jose Pedro Ferreira
>>>>>> n:Ferreira;Jose Pedro
>>>>>> org:CERN;IT-UDS-AVC
>>>>>> adr:;;;Geneva;;;Switzerland
>>>>>> email;internet:jose.pedro.ferreira@cern.ch
>>>>>> title:Software Developer
>>>>>> tel;work:+41 22 76 75025
>>>>>> tel;cell:+41 763 045 795
>>>>>> x-mozilla-html:FALSE
>>>>>> url:http://www.zarquon.biz
>>>>>> version:2.1
>>>>>> end:vcard
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jesse Erdmann
>>> jesse@jesseerdmann.com
>>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/jesseerdmann
>>> Blog: http://blog.jesseerdmann.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
> <jose_pedro_ferreira.vcf>

--
Dr Ioannis N. Athanasiadis
IDSIA - Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale
Galleria 2, CH-6928 Manno, Lugano, Switzerland
tel: +41-586-666-671 fax: +41-586-666-661 mob: +41-798-141-680
ioannis@idsia.ch - www.idsia.ch - www.athanasiadis.info

Received on Saturday, 2 February 2008 05:25:32 UTC