Patrick Cassidy wrote: (01)
> One of the possible components of the Foundation Ontology project that I
> think should be included is an API that serves to enable global search over
> any set of relational databases that have elements mapped to the FO. (02)
I've been mucking around with a project I have been calling the "Total
Perspective Vortex", inspired by the descriptions by Douglas Adams [1],
and knowing the last thing that I could possibly attain is a sense of
perspective! (03)
> The FO project as I envision it also includes development of an
> effective Natural Language interface, but if adequate funding is
> not available, perhaps a smaller project with just the RBD
> integration demo would be a useful start. (04)
I agree, and I don't think that a natural language interface would be
necessary, but a very nice feature. (05)
> Some sample RDB's and example queries could demonstrate how
> federated query with cross-DB inferencing could work. (06)
Sounds like a good fit for a well packaged open source project. (07)
Start small, use your cast off PC's for a test bench, and when you start
running out of space, buy virtual machine(s) in from a cloud, and
continue to scale up. Have the ability to make your repository
available to other people or organizations that want to use it, with
bandwidth and query limit clamps that can keep your costs from
ballooning out of control. (08)
You should be able to select which peers you trust, so if someone puts
up some contact that is, shall we say, "less than stellar," you can
avoid their stuff. You should also be able to incorporate a "seal of
approval", so things "blessed" by an organization or individual you
trust are automatically incorporated into your "view" of the world. (09)
There are a few more twists I've been struggling with. (010)
The first is to manage the content with some distributed version control
methodology like Mercurial, that does not assume there is one single
blessed version. There needs to be a way that you and I can make
changes to content independently and control the merge process. There
may still be one "blessed" version that is published, but the real world
moves faster than any one "blessing". Even within one organization
there may be multiple versions of the content floating around, and
development teams "pushing" and "pulling" updates between them. (011)
And the last piece is to incorporate a set of inference, validation, and
regression testing tools. (012)
I'll let you know when it's ready :-). (013)
Joel
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Billion_Year_Bunker#Total_Perspective_Vortex (014)
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