In practical terms hosting a public endpoint is an expensive business.
To take DBPedia as an example it is billions of triples and so needs
appropriate hardware. Let’s assume you wanted to host this in Amazon EC2
and wanted to use a r3.8xlarge instance (32 cores, 244 GiB RAM, 2x320GB
SSD, 10 GigE network) as an example. The hourly rate for this is $2.66
per hour which works out as approximately $23,000 per year, even if we
were to use a reserve instance and pay up front that would still cost
approximately $12,000 per year. This is before we even take into account
bandwidth, Storage and ongoing support costs. As has already been
pointed out everybody here is volunteers, we do not have any large
corporate sponsors like other high profile Apache projects, so where do
you expect that money to come from?
Rob
I know about the calculations since so many years, but 'out of the blue'
if some managers wanted a presentation with my Sparql-Query-UI using the
well-known Dbpedia public endpoint and they wanted to see very fluently
working query-process a bit more intelligent then Google, and if you come
then after 10 minutes with 'Excuse me, yo know the costs of an
endpoint...', they think, where a good idea is, there is also money for it
in such a simple demonstration case, why is there no money for such a good
idea? To make some simple live-experience with a permanently reliable
public-endpoint accessible for each one to each time is much-much more
important than harebrained SPARQL-queries.
I have had always the feeling something went wrong in this story, the
question is what?
baran
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