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.
