As I am sure you know, this matter comes down to the ability to expose existing data (SQL, XML, Free Text) as RDF Instance Data.

This is why we built a Virtual DBMS using an ORDBMS many years ago (circa. 1998, see the story at: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/VOSHistory/ ).

Virtuoso provides the ability to expose Native or 3rd party data as RDF Instance Data via our RDF VIEWs capability etc.. There’s lots of material on this subject at: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/VOSRDF/ .

I expect other DBMS vendors to follow

I was certainly struck by how similar your vision is to the semantic web one. I think we’re all striving for the same goal using different technologies. It would be great if the different communities could work together more closely toward this common goal. I would love to see MySQL be a pioneer for the Semantic Web but I don’t know how to catalyse this. What do you suggest?

Ian

Thanks for commenting on my presentation, and sorry if I did not give proper credit to the semantic web, which I should have. I certainly had not come up with those ideas myself – but I hope I gave them a flavour which lends itself to SQL databases. I can also gladly admit that I am no expert on the semantic web.

But I would also wonder if it isn’t actually a strength of the concepts of the semantic web that even an amateur like myself can present something so that it sounds like the semantic web.

Marten Mickos, MySQL AB

I agree with you. It’s all too easy to point and say “we already thought of that” but much much harder to show concrete benefits of an alternate approach. The semweb community needs to spend more time understanding other domains and the motivations of the users in those domains.

For example, lots of people use databases and understand them pretty well. However most databases don’t let you easily reference data in other databases. Within a single vendor’s product there are usually schemes for addressing other tablespaces on the same machine and sometimes on different machines. But in general you can’t reference data in another vendor’s software or in a very remote location. That’s a problem that the semantic web solves very simply by giving all important data elements a URI which can refer to local things or remote things across network and vendor boundaries.

So, when a user encounters the problem of referencing data in different domains then the semantic web offers one possible solution to that. I’d like to see more effort spent on this kind of benefit evaluation from both sides.

Ian

I couldn’t agree more… over the last 6 months I have been talking about my vision for the future of data (Data2.0, corny tagline I know but hey…)
Now I come from a practical background in O/RMapping, with my own WinFS like product Base4.

Part of the problem I think for us non-semweb people, is the dismissive tone of some of the comments you get when you start getting excited about this stuff, statements like: “this is nothing new, it’s just RDF” are common catch cries that we often hear when a semweb advocate has only taken a cursorly glance at what we are discussing.

It seems the focus is alway on ‘what is the same’ about the idea, rather than ‘what is different’. When perhaps ‘what is different’ is much more interesting because of the very fact that it originated somewhere else, i.e. RDBMS or O/RMapping. And often that somewhere else is a who lot more practical and pragmatic too.

BTW, I am not saying ALL or even most semweb guys are dismissive, there are plenty who aren’t, but it only takes 2 or 3 dismissive comments, and newbies are likely to bury the head in the sand even further, no one likes hearing they are unoriginal!

Cheers
Alex