Re: foaf-search.net has been relaunched

Hello Christophe,

On Sun, Dec 08, 2013 at 07:33:09AM +0100, Christophe Guéret wrote:
> We do not use a triple store any more - all important data is kept in a RDB.
> >
> That's an interesting technical choice... could you tell a bit more why you
> did the switch?

For the kind of search options we are offering, we only need to store certain
data: URIs, inverse functional properties and names of persons. As this data
has a fixed schema and partly has to be searched with a full text search
(word matches instead of full matches), storing it in a RDB is easier and seems
to be the natural choice. In fact we were using a RDB to do this from the start.

Regarding the other data: There was no point in investing large amounts of
money into infrastructure to keep a mostly outdated copy of large parts of
the Semantic Web. So when the triple store on our single machine running 
foaf-search.net grew too big, we made the natural next step: We added a
table listing the relevant RDF URLs for every person and wrote the component 
that would fetch and cache those URLs when needed to execute SPARQL queries 
over them.

Regards,

Michael Brunnbauer

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