On 5/26/2011 3:11 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> ... but today you have middleware solutions that produce
> Linked Data Views over relational data sources. There's even an R2RML
> [1] effort from the W3C to standardize this effort. That said, I grasp
> the context of your gripe. This should have been one of the first areas
> of total emphasis back in the day. (01)
But those middleware solutions are *trivial* compared to the research
that was done in the 1990s. The SW technology available in 2011 could
have been developed far better a decade ago if the W3C gang had done
their homework and read the published research in the 1990s. (02)
Please read the following article from 1994 -- the same year that
Tim B-L gave his first speech on his vision for the Semantic Web: (03)
http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/~gfletcher/2id35-spring11/reading/tsatalos.pdf
A Unified Framework for Indexing in Database Systems (04)
The authors presented a more detailed version at the VLDB conference
in 1996: (05)
http://tinyurl.com/3pedzwd
The GMAP: A Versatile Tool for Physical Data Independence (06)
> It took a long time for SPARQL to emerge from the W3C's Semantic Web
> project, relative to the inaugural article in Scientific American. (07)
But what you really need is the option of executing both SPARQL
queries and SQL queries on *exactly the same data* without requiring
any mapping or reformatting -- and that's what you get with Gmaps
(Generalized Combinatorial Maps). (08)
The authors demonstrated that the Gmap encoding could support *both*
relational queries (e.g. SQL) and path-based queries (similar to SPARQL)
on exactly the same Gmap representations. Furthermore, the Gmap format
required *fewer* disk accesses than the native relational storage for
SQL queries or the native OODB storage for path-based queries. (09)
That is the best of both worlds -- and they implemented it in 1994. (010)
The architects have some of the largest applications of Gmaps for
storing and accessing huge graphs. A shopping mall with multiple
stores connected to a couple of large hotels, a movie theater,
etc., can be represented by a graph with billions of nodes. (011)
And Gmaps are so efficient that they can dynamically create virtual
reality views in real time. They can let you "walk" through the
mall at any speed and look around as you go. They even let you
take a virtual helicopter flight over the buildings and recreate
the views from any viewing angle. (012)
For more info, use your favorite search engine to find references.
But the acronym Gmaps is ambiguous, since it can also mean "Google
maps." So add the word 'combinatorial' to your search list. (013)
> I really believe that via Linked Data Graphs the critical
> foundation opens up for much broader participation that truly
> works the broader tech continuum. It's going to happen since
> you can never really hold a good thing down! (014)
I agree, but a group with a lot of influence, such as the W3C, can
either promote technology or hold it back. In this case, it's been
17 years since that publication in 1994, and the W3C still hasn't
got the message. (015)
John (016)
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