David and Kingsley, (01)
DE
> Linking all this stuff together isn't new. How long has ODBC been
> around? At least 20 years?
>
> What does Linked Data add to the challenge of "I wonder what's in this
> column/field/cell?" (02)
I would like to add that the ANSI/SPARC conceptual schema addressed
these issues in 1978. It was designed to support *all* the kinds of
databases available in the 1970s -- that included hierarchical (IMS),
network (CODASYL DBTG), and relational (IBM, Oracle, Ingres). (03)
In 1987, ISO produced a TR that extended the ANSI report to include
all versions of databases in those days *and* the work on knowledge
based systems in AI. The annual VLDB conferences were very active
for years in supporting R & D on these topics. They had implemented
commercial systems that demonstrated solutions to these problems. (04)
KI
> We've developed and deployed ODBC Drivers for all major RDBMS
> engines for 20 years. One problem that ODBC never addressed was
> the ability to extend data access beyond RDBMS engines. It also
> had a degree of platform specificity, so Windows always had the
> richest collection of ODBC compliant applications. I've written
> some posts [1][2][3][4] about the data connectivity and platform
> specificity shortcomings of ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLE-DB. (05)
I followed up those links and checked out the FAQ on openlinksw: (06)
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/virt_faq/ (07)
That is good technology, and the Semantic Web should have *started*
with that approach. They could have done the world a major service:
(1) integrate all those data sources with a uniform conceptual schema,
and (2) adopt an *implementation-independent* logic to define the
semantics of the data and the operations. (08)
This is *not* a criticism with 20-20 hindsight. This is what the
DB experts had been analyzing, designing, and implementing long
before Tim B-L proposed the SW in 1994. (09)
The major reason why the ANSI/SPARC conceptual schema had not been
adopted as a standard is that the DB vendors did not want to support
an implementation-independent standard -- for the simple reason that
they wanted to lock customers into their implementations. (010)
But the SW gang had the hubris to claim "We're so big and so new
that we can ignore everything that went before." They did. And
they repeated every mistake of the past plus a lot of new ones. (011)
John (012)
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