Re: ODBC driver for RDF?

> [Sandro Hawke]
> 
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Interesting... Clearly any one statement could return its triple as a row.
> What would play the role of a table?  The RDF data on one particular server
> at one base URL? The fields would be pretty unintelligible to people unless
> there were human-readable labels - where would they come from, if they were
> not specifically supplied as labels by other RDF statements?  How should
> anonymous and generated nodes be handled?

I'm imagining something that would look natural at both sides.  I
think that means
   
     SQL      RDF
     ===      ===
     table    Class
     column   Property
     row      object ("Resource")

Unfortunately, this assumes all properties are daml:UniqueProperties.
daml:UnambiguousProperties would be SQL UNIQUE KEY columns.

Maybe non-UniqueProperties should be handled by having more rows which
have otherwise-the-same column data.

Sub-property inference, etc, could be handled by the ODBCdriver.  The
ODBC application modifying data would see other data automatically
added/changed, much as with other databases-with-rules.

     -- sandro