RE: RDF API convergence?

***PLEASE BEWARE with follow-ups, this is a cross-post***

> I haven't quite been able to wrap my head around how one would use an RDF
> model like the DMOZ dumps without loading it into memory or importing it
> into a database that you could query against. The question I have is this:
> Can an API be devised that abstracts away whether or not the model is loaded
> into memory or persisted in a database and still be useful to us as
> developers?

Ok, this is not exactly RDF, which probably needs a different API than
DOM's, but http://www.4Suite.com/ (part of Python's DOM et al.
implementation) is having a go at abtracting a DOM document whatever its
storage may be (memory, DB or flat file). The API they use is called 4ODS
and documentation is available at http://fourthought.com/4Suite/4Ods/. ODS
is an ODMG standard for persistent objects.

> I remember reading (but can't recall where) that the RDF model is actually
> extremely close to the relational model. The author pointed out that columns
> are like properties and field like objects where the primary key in each row
> was the subject. This obviously doesn't take into consideration repeated
> properties and a number of other issues but it did open my mind up to start
> thinking about storing a RDF in a more resource-centric manner. One of my
> goals for RDF.NET is to explore this approach and see where it ends up.

As for storing/querying big xml repositories, there is code to look at and
implementation ideas to borrow from at http://www.dbxml.com/,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdbm/ and http://www.xmldb.org/.

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

http://www.logilab.com - "Mais oł est donc Ornicar ?" - LOGILAB, Paris (France)

Received on Sunday, 12 November 2000 08:59:10 UTC