ODBC driver for RDF?

I was trying to explain RDF to my sister who makes her living building
database backed websites with Cold Fusion, and I had a good idea.
Maybe it's been done.  I dunno.

Someone should write an ODBC driver for RDF.  It would make the
(nascent) universe of RDF data available on the web just look like
another SQL database -- which my sister could format into web pages,
or alter with web forms, etc, etc.

This is sort of a compliment to the problem I've seen some people
working on: how do you store RDF data in a SQL database with a natural
& efficient mapping.

The issues include:
  
   1.  How do you identify RDF data sources?   And RDF "database" may
       be spread out over lots of servers.

   2.  How do you map RDF data (with it's long/ugly property names) to
       SQL tables?  Can you make it look like nice, normal database
       tables locally AND like nice, normal RDF on the net?  I think
       so, if you give a decent bit of configuration information.

   3.  What are the RDF access protocols?   HTTP GET of a text/xml
       file containing RDF/XML works, but it would be nice to get
       more sophisticated one of these days!

ODBC drivers are win32 things (as I understand it), so I wont be
writing this.  There is unixODBC which I could hack on, and there's
JDBC.  The bigger market would be for true ODBC, but I guess a
proof-of-concept, prototype, etc, could be done the other ways.

   -- sandro

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2001 23:49:39 UTC