On Apr 8, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
I am assuming:
(1) you (the linker) do not know
(2) you do not have access to the person who does know
(3) the person who does know is likely only partially correct.
SemWeb is looking for a presentation Tuesday. Can you show how Linked Data resolves this "semantic connectivity" issue?
I just sent a reply to Rich, I forgot to make it clear that I was also responding to you. If my posts don't clarity matters, I'll address the questions you posed further.
Making the actual—physical—connection is of course crucial. Having the pipe between point A (point of origin) & point B (destination) is fundamental to the data connectivity challenge.
It is certainly interesting (that's not a positive) that ODBC was limited to RDBMs data sinks. Definitely kudos for expanding the ODBC connectivity universe.
Let me offer a smidge of context... if I'm talking to a technical/data person at a Fortune 500 shop & they tell me they're a Database X shop, I instantly know I'm not talking to the right person. The correct answer is "Yes." We have it—DB2, IDMS, M204, S2000, IMS, Oracle, Sybase & of course the Mother of all databases the $2M Excel spreadsheet—pretty much anything & everything.
I ran into a guy who confessed his shop had 28 DBMS engines... I can only get to about 17... ignoring desktop, but widely deployed, engines such as SQL Server, Rbase, Mimer, 4D, Filemaker, Postgres, XBase, etc., etc., etc.
Folks who assume the corporate world is "relational" clearly don't get out enough. IBM's IMS product still generates US$700M in revenue. From the customer's perspective, it's bought, paid for, & performs within know boundaries... why endure a 10 year migration to another DBMS?
This background is only to point out that legacy silos are here to stay... eventually they do fade away & get unplugged, but far more often additional layers are wrapped around existing silos.
So the SEMANTIC CONNECTIVITY challenge becomes... [drum roll...] How do I know what I'm putting into the pipe at Point A when I want to tap a legacy source? See the above 3 questions.
And there should likely be a #4... the data source is likely not webified/HTTP enabled.
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David Eddy