Re: GUADEC redux and roadmap

[Wolfgang Nejdl <nejdl kbs uni-hannover de>]

Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 17:32 +0200, Enrico Minack wrote:
> > Joe, it would be great if these metadata would be stored as RDF. Both
> > the metadata as well as their schemas can be represented as RDF, which
> > then makes the RDF store the perfect exchange mechanism between all
> > applications generating these metadata, and applications using them. We
> > use that approach in our NEPOMUK project, and it works very well to
> > integrate contributions from different project partners.
> 
> RDF is a definite possibility for this.  I am looking at the SemWeb
> library for this. (http://taubz.for.net/code/semweb/)
> 
> Another possibility is to store it in a more straightforward relational
> database and then build RDF from that later.  (This was more or less our
> current plan with Lucene.)
> 

In our project (NEPOMUK), we evaluated existing RDF storage systems, and
finally settled on Sesame (http://www.openrdf.org/) for efficiency and
functionality reasons. It can use various backends, we are using the
MySQL one.

> Like I said, I'll have to build a prototype and see what works and
> scales and what doesn't.  Fortunately I have millions of documents I
> regularly test on, so I should be able to give it a good once over.
> 
> One thing I'm not sure on is that you talk about RDF being a perfect
> "exchange mechanism" for your data.  Do you mean sharing common
> namespaces like Dublin Core?  Common ways of expressing RDF like RDF-XML
> or N3?  Or something else?

Expressing metadata in RDF format, as described e.g. in
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ 

RDF is the data format, RDFS the schema language (also expressed as
RDF). Dublin Core would correspond to a specific schema, but in general
you have lots of schemas you would like to use on the desktop. When you
exchange RDF metadata between different applications, you often use the
XML serialization of RDF, i.e. RDF-XML (understood by all RDF
toolkits). 

Wolfgang

http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/

> 
> Joe
> 
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