Hello Sebastian
I share your concerns, even though (or precisely because) I'm not a
'referent' in Application and Data storage interoperability, I'm a
seasoned SW engineer (1). My feedback on your article, is that the
use case illustrates the challenges and needs for a web of
interoperables solutions (maybe you could mention SKOS among the
Semweb languages)
My interest for interoperability started in 1997, at this time there
was CORBA and Microsoft COM, then regarding RDBMS, there was
ODBC/JDBC. There was also all the vendors buzz like SAP pretending
to teach esperanto to the babel towers of legacy apps (but in fact
replacing backoffice apps by theirs)
Some time XML and its modelling 'applications' (XML Schema and XMI)
gave me some hopes, but still no concrete sign of 'user driven apps'
built by a dynamic process of looking for and assembling
'autodescribed components' (SOAP and WSDL was then a kind of CORBA
successor)
Before the Semantic Web,
I had never really 'bought' the idea that SQL based Data Storage was
considered as a 'Silver Bullet', ORM solutions seemed to bring even
more entropy.
But with the advent of Graph Databases (e.g. Neo4J) and this
brilliant solution (Apache MetaModel) for Data Storage
interoperability, I am at last more comfortable and comfortable with
the idea that the solutions are available for designing
interoperable solutions in an elegant way at last.
I am most fluent in the DataViz and ETL dimensions of Semantic
networks. I authored a mindmapping app in 2004: Thinkgraph, now I'm
prototyping a solution to provide interoperability between 'knowledge
visualization' (e.g. TheBrain, XMind), Data Storage and Curating
platforms (e.g. Pinterest, Evernote, Youtube, etc..).
I chose .Net/C# as my development workshop thats why I started a port of
Apache MetaModel in C#.
Best Regards
Michel Kern
1. Dassault Systèmes 1991-2000, Nokia 2001-2010
