On 8/3/11 3:54 PM, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
Anyway, I'll take a look at what can be done re. this critical final
mile decoupling :-)
Good luck with that! You may find that, in practice, the capabilities
of these systems are very different, and that there is no completely
unified way of talking to them. Many systems offer additional
"non-standard" features that are specifically dear to their users, and
that one wants to support when using them. For example, our
applications of 4Store specifically are motivated by its non-standard
resource limit feature that aborts query execution if a query takes
too long. Also, not all features of SPARQL 1.1 are implemented in all
stores, so one needs to implement workarounds in some cases (we have
done this for 4Store to get INSERT ... DELETE ... working).
I live in a dimension that is all about the ability to homogenize data
access across heterogeneous data sources (Graph or Relational).
The RDBMS side is much simpler than you assume. The problem is people
don't understand ODBC, ODBC metadata APIs, and ODBC escape syntax, sadly :-(
Virtuoso (pre all this Linked Data and Graph DBMS stuff) was built
(circa. 1998) to deliver exactly what I described above. You should be
able to work with a Virtual DBMS with all the smarts for abstracting
backend DBMS idiosyncrasies.
The only factor between what I outlined above and it becoming reality is
motivation on the part of OpenLink to make it happen, that's it.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
