Friedrich, I'm forwarding your message to one of the W3 lists. Some of your questions could be easily answered (e.g. for euro in your context, you don't have a predicate for that, you have an Observation with units of a currency and you could take the currency from dbpedia, the predicate is "units").
But I think your concerns are quite valid generally and your experience reflects that of most web site developers that encounter RDF. LOD list, Friedrich is a clueful developer, responsible for http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ amongst other things. What can we learn from this? How do we make this better? -w ----- Forwarded message from Friedrich Lindenberg <friedr...@pudo.org> ----- From: Friedrich Lindenberg <friedr...@pudo.org> Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2010 11:56:20 +0100 Message-Id: <a9089567-6107-4b43-b442-d09dcc0c3...@pudo.org> To: wdmmg-discuss <wdmmg-disc...@lists.okfn.org> Subject: [wdmmg-discuss] Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo (reposting to list): Hi all, As an action from OGDCamp, Rufus and I agreed that we should resume porting WDMMG to RDF in order to make the data model more flexible and to allow a merger between WDMMG, OffenerHaushalt and similar other projects. After a few days, I'm now over the whole idea of porting WDMMG to RDF. Having written a long technical pro/con email before (that I assume contained nothing you don't already know), I think the net effect of using RDF would be the following: * Lots of coolness, sucking up to linked data people. * Further research regarding knowledge representation. vs. * Unstable and outdated technological base. No triplestore I have seen so far seemed on par with MySQL 4. * No freedom wrt to schema, instead modelling overhead. Spent 30 minutes trying to find a predicate for "Euro". * Scares off developers. Invested 2 days researching this, which is how long it took me to implement OHs backend the first time around. Project would need to be sustained through linked data grad students. * Less flexibility wrt to analytics, querying and aggregation. SPARQL not so hot. * Good chance of chewing up the UI, much harder to implement editing. I normally enjoy learning new stuff. This is just painful. Most of the above points are probably based on my ignorance, but it really shouldn't take a PhD to process some gov spending tables. I'll now start a mongo effort because I really think this should go schema-free + I want to get stuff moving. If you can hold off loading Uganda and Israel for a week that would of course be very cool, we could then try to evaluate how far this went. Progress will be at: http://bitbucket.org/pudo/wdmmg-core Friedrich _______________________________________________ wdmmg-discuss mailing list wdmmg-disc...@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- William Waites http://eris.okfn.org/ww/foaf#i 9C7E F636 52F6 1004 E40A E565 98E3 BBF3 8320 7664
