Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

Where Are All the RDF-based Semantic Web Applications?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:09:00 GMT

In response to the "Semantic Web Technology" application classification scheme espoused by ReadWriteWeb (RWW), emphasized in the post titled: Where are all the RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?, here is my attempt to clarify and reintroduce what OpenLink Software offers (today) in relation to Semantic Web technology.

From the RWW Top-Down category, which I interpret as: technologies that produce RDF from non RDF data sources. Our product portfolio is comprised of the following; Virtuoso Universal Server, OpenLink Data Spaces, OpenLink Ajax Toolkit, and OpenLink Data Explorer (which includes ubiquity commands).

Virtuoso Universal Server functionality summary:

Generation of RDF Linked Data Views of SQL, XML, and Web Services in general
Deployment of RDF Linked Data
"On the Fly" generation of RDF Linked Data from Document Web information resources (i.e. distillation of entities from their containers e.g. Web pages) via Cartridges / Drivers
SPARQL query language support
SPARQL extensions that bring SPARQL closer to SQL e.g Aggregates, Update, Insert, Delete Named Graph support (i.e. use of logical names to partition RDF data within Virtuoso's multi-model dbms engine)
Inference Engine (currently in use re. DBpedia via Yago and UMBEL)
Host and exposes data from Drupal, Wordpress, MediaWiki, phpBB3 as RDF Linked Data via in-built support for PHP runtime
Available as an EC2 AMI
etc..

OpenLink Data Spaces functionality summary:

Simple mechanism for Linked Data Web enabling yourself by giving you an HTTP based User ID (a de-referencable URI) that is linked to a FOAF based Profile page and OpenID
Binds all your data sources (blogs, wikis, bookmarks, photos, calendar items etc. ) to your URI so can "Find" things by only remembering your URI
Makes your profile page and personal URI the focal point of Linked Data Web presence
Delivers Data Portability (using data access by value or data access by reference) across data silos (e.g. Web 2.0 style social networks)
Allows you make annotations about anything in your own Data Space(s) on the Web without exposure to RDF markup
A Briefcase feature that provides a WebDAV driven RDF Linked Data variant of functionality seen in Mac OS X Spotlight and WinFS with the addition of SPARQL compliance
Automatically generates RDFa in its (X)HTML pages
Blog, Wiki, WebDAV File Server, Shared Bookmarks, Calendar, and other applications that look and feel like Web 2.0 counterparts but emitt RDF Linked Data amongst a plethora of data exchange formats
Available as an EC2 AMI
etc..

OpenLink Ajax Toolkit functionality summary:

Provides binding to SQL, RDF, XML, and Web Services via Ajax Database Connectivity Layer (you only need an ODBC, JDBC, OLE-DB, ADO.NET, XMLA Driver, or Web Service on the backend for dynamic data access from Javascript)
All controls are Ajax Database Connectivity bound (widgets get their data from Ajax Database Connectivity data sources)
Bundled with Virtuoso and ODS installations.
etc.

OpenLink Data Explorer functionality summary

Distills entities associated with information resource style containers (e.g. Web Pages or files) as RDF Linked Data
Exposes the RDF based Linked Data graph associated with information resources (see the Linked Data behind Web pages)
Ubiquity commands for invoking the above
Available as a Hosted Service or Firefox Extension
Bundled with Virtuoso and ODS installations
etc.

Note:

Of course you could have simply looked up OpenLink Software's FOAF based Profile page (*note the Linked Data Explorer tab*), or simply passed the FOAF profile page URL to a Linked Data aware client application such as: OpenLink Data Explorer, Zitgist Data Viewer, Marbles, and Tabulator, and obtained information. Remember, OpenLink Software is an Entity of Type: foaf:Organization, on the burgeoning Linked Data Web :-)

Linked Data Planet Keynote (RDFa based remix edition)
On The Cusp: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry.

DBMS Hosted Filesystems & WinFS

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 21:41:33 GMT

The return of WinFS back into SQL Server has re-ignited interest in the somewhat forgotten “DBMS Engine hosted Unified Storage System” vision. The WinFS project struggles have more to do with the futility of “Windows Platform Monoculture” than the actual vision itself. In today's reality you simply cannot seek to deliver a “Unified Storage” solution that's inherently operating system specific, and even worse, ignores existing complimentary industry standards and the loosely coupled nature of the emerging Web Operating System.

A quick FYI:
Virtuoso has offered a DBMS hosted Filesystem via WebDAV for a number of years, but the implications of this functionality have remained unclear for just as long. Thus, we developed (a few years ago) and released (recently) an application layer above Virtuoso's WebDAV storage realm called: “The OpenLink Briefcase” (nee. oDrive). This application allows you to view items uploaded by content type and/or kind (People, Business Cards, Calendars, Business Reports, Office Documents, Photos, Blog Posts, Feed Channels/Subscriptions, Bookmarks etc..). it also includes automatic metadata extraction (where feasible) and indexing. Naturally, as an integral part of our “OpenLink Data Spaces” (ODS) product offering, it supports GData, URIQA, SPARQL (note: WebDAV metadata is sync'ed with Virtuoso's RDF Triplestore), SQL, and WebDAV itself.

You can explore the power of this product via the following routes:

Download the Virtuoso Open Source Edition and the ODS add-ons or
Visit our live demo server (note: this is strictly a demo server with full functionality available) and simply register and then create a “Briefcase” application instance
Digest this Briefcase Home Page Screenshot

Email As A Platform

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:01:57 GMT

Email As A Platform It looks like more people are starting to realize that email is more than it seems. Especially given the drastic increase in storage size of web-based email applications, more people are realizing that email is basically a personal database. People simply store information in their email, from contact information that was emailed to them to schedule information to purchase tracking from emailed receipts. Lots of people email messages to themselves, realizing that email is basically the best "permanent" filing system they have. That's part of the reason why good email search is so important. Of course, what the article doesn't discuss is the next stage of this evolution. If you have a database of important information, the next step is to build useful applications on top of it. In other words, people are starting to realize that email, itself, is a platform for personal information management.

[via Techdirt]

Yep! And this is where the Unified Storage vision comes into play. Many years ago the same issues emerged in the business application realm, and at the time the issue at hand was: separating the DBMS engine from the Application logic. This is what the SQL Access Group (SAG) addressed via the CLI that laid the foundation for ODBC, JDBC, and recent derivatives; OLE DB and ADO.NET.

Most of us live inside our email applications and the need to integrate the content of emails, address books, notes, calendars with other data sources (Web Portal, Blogs, Wikis, CRM, ERP, and more) as part of our application interaction cycles and domain specific workflow is finally becoming obvious. There is a need for separation of the application/service layer from the storage engine across each one of these functionality realms. XML, RDF, and Triple Stores (RDF / Semantic Data Stores) collectively provide a standards based framework for achieving this goal. On the other hand so does WinFS albeit total proprietary (by this I mean none standards compliant) at the current time.

As you can already see there are numerous applications (conventional or hosted) that address email, address books, bookmarking, notes, calendars, blogs, wikis, crm etc. specifically, but next to none that address the obvious need for transparent integration across each functionality realm - the ultimate goal.

Yes, you know what I am about to say! OpenLink Virtuoso is the platform for developing and/or implementing these next generation solutions. We have also decided to go one step further by developing a number of applications that demonstrate the vision (and ultimate reality); and each of these applications (and the inherent integration tapestry) will be the subject of a future Virtuoso Application specific post.

Is Google Web 2.0's Netscape?

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 21:52:30 GMT

I put this piece together in response to another stimulating post by Dare Obasanjo titled "Is Google the Next Microsoft or the Next Netscape?". I changed the title of this post to project the fact that Web 2.0 provides the appropriate context (IMHO) for Dare's point re. "Web Site Stickiness".

Stickiness is a defining characteristic of Web 1.0 . It's all about eyeballs (site visitors) which implied ultimately that all early Web business models ended up down the advertising route.

I always felt that Web 1.0 was akin to having a crowd of people at your reception area seeking a look at your corporate brochures, and then someone realizes that you could start selling AD space in these brochures in response to the growing crowd size and frequency of congregation. The long-term folly of this approach is now obvious, as many organizations forgot their core value propositions (expressed via product offerings) in the process and wandered blindly down the AD model cul-de-sac, and we all know what happened down there..

Web 2.0 is taking shape (the inflection is in its latter stages), and the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

Fabric of Executable Endpoints
Semantic Content (the RSS/RDF/Atom/FOAF semantic crumbs emerging from the Blogosphere are great examples of things to come re. XQuery queries over HTTP for instance) Migration from the Web Site (defined by static or dynamic HTML page generation) concept, to that of a "Web Point of Presence" (I don't know if this term will catch on, but the conceptual essence here is factual) that enables an organization to achieve the following:

Package/catalog value proposition (product and services) using RSS/RDF/Atom
Provide SOAP compliant Executable Endpoints (Web Services) for consuming value proposition (as opposed to being distracted by the AD model)
Provide Web Services for consummating contracts associated with core value proposition Identification of internal efficiencies, new products/services that leverage Semantic Content and Web Services, and tangibly exploit:

Composite Web Services construction from legacy monolithic application pools
Standards based (e.g. BPEL) orchestration and integration of disparate composite services (across the Fabric referred to above)

When you factor in all of the above, the real question is whether Google and others are equipped to exploit Web 2.0? To some degree, is the best answer at the current time as they have commenced the transition from "content only" web site to web platform (via the many Web Services initiatives that expose SOAP and REST interfaces to various services), but there is much more to this journey, and that's the devil in the "competitive landscape details".

From my obviously biased perspective, I think Virtuoso and Yukon+WinFS provide the server models for driving Web 2.0 points of presence (single server instances that implement multiple protocols). Thus, if Google, Yahoo! et al. aren't exploiting these or similar products, then they will be vulnerable over the long term to the competitve challenges that a Web 2.0 landscape will present.

The Google PC & BlogTelepathy

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:09:20 GMT

I was on a conference call with the Virtuoso product manager about the opportunities WinFS and RDF Storage provide regarding yet another attempt to get

SQL Support in Mozilla?

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 16:13:30 GMT

Mozilla's SQL Support allows applications to directly connect to SQL databases. A web application no longer needs to pass information through a scripting language, such as Perl or Python, in order to recieve information it can use. The removal of the layer seperating applications and data simplifies the job of the programmer.

Somehow I missed this effort, and only stumbled across it today after experimenting with Virtuoso's SyncML features (and then pondering about OutLook, WinFS, and what may or may not happen with SyncML support - another story).

As usual the SQL binding to Mozilla caught my attention (I do recall trying to get Marc and Jim Clark to head down this path many years ago via an email; at least Jim acknowledged not knowing that much about SQL and past it on.., and as for Marc well... nothing happened).

A few

Microsoft Killing the Web ?

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 21:26:34 GMT

This is a really interesting collection of Blogobillia!

It starts here with one of many excerpts from Scoble's blog:

Dave Winer, Jon Udell, and now Gerald Bauer says that Microsoft is killing the Web. Or trying to.

The guys above are pretty seasoned individuals (they save me a lot of writing too amongst other things).

Now here is a response from Microsoft?s Blog evangelist supremo Scoble to their comments and genuine concerns.

OK, let's assume that's true.

Microsoft has 55,000 employees. $50 billion or so in the bank.

Yet what has gotten me to use the Web less and less lately? RSS 2.0.

Seriously. I rarely use the browser anymore (except to post my weblog since I use Radio UserLand).

See the irony there? Dave Winer (who at minimum popularized RSS 2.0) has done more to get me to move away from the Web than a huge international corporation that's supposedly focused on killing the Web.

Now, let's look at what's really going on here. We're going back to being a great platform company. We're trying to provide a platform that lets developers build new applications that are impossible to build on other platforms. At the PDC you saw some of that. New kinds of forms. New kinds of games. New kinds of business apps. New kinds of experiences.

But, we also are looking for ways to make the Web better too. Now, we haven't talked about what we're doing with the browser. I hear that'll come later. Astute Longhorn testers have already seen that we snuck a pop-up ad blocker into the browser without telling anyone about it. Whoa. That means we're gonna turn off MSN's capabilities of selling popup ads.

I hear there's more coming too. But, why should we do it all? Wasn't the point of the past four years to get Microsoft to stop trying to do it all? The DOJ and now the European Union are still after us cause we tried to do it all. Instead, let's just go back and be a great platform company.

We just gave you a great foundation for a killer new kind of application. One that goes FAR beyond HTML. And, even if you stick with Mozilla, your experiences on Longhorn will get better. For instance, fonts are being rendered in the GPU now on Longhorn. Your Web pages will look better and behave better on Longhorn than they will on any other platform. Period.

And wait until Mozilla's and other developers start exploiting things like WinFS to give you new features that display Internet-based information in whole new ways.

If Microsoft really wants to create a better platform shouldn?t this be truly futuristic? If so, then it should issue the first major salvo by dropping the restrictions on Rotor?

We are moving into the distributed component based computing age where runtime environments (.NET CLR, Mono, J2EE, and others) act a Component Execution Junction boxes (instead of the Monolithic Operating Systems of today) in a continuum of services orchestrated by messages in response to events emanating from value consumption requests (what we call application behviour today) from a myriad of value consumers (application users).

There is no need for covert and protracted protection of an obsolete Windows Operating System (the underlying fear that keeps Rotor shackled in my opinion), since its obsolescence is in full motion as Longhorn clearly demonstrates.

Imagine a fusion of sorts across Microsoft .NET, Mono, and Rotor, with a single portable runtime as the end product (slotting nicely into its place in the imminent distributed component and services era). All the benefits of programming language independence in true glory - the ECMA-CLI is all about programming language independence. Now that would be unequivocally revolutionary, and Microsoft would actually be doing what I think it has been desperately trying to achieve for a long time; the delivery of really cool technology that seriously impact us all in a positive way without the usual World Domination Concerns.

Anyway, back to the current reality where we have covert attempts to lock us all into Windows getting more and more transparent per technology release cycle. The very antithesis of what I espoused in the last paragraph (or dream). I believe that Scoble's instincts lie in this realm too, and you never know this evangelist may turn Messiah :-)

Here's the final excerpt from Scoble?s post:

There's a whole lot of more useful stuff coming. Both for the Web and for newer Internet-centric rich-client approaches. Personally, it's about time. I'm already using the Web less and less thanks to things like RSS 2.0.

I'm watching 636 sites every day. Try to do THAT in your Web browser.

So, yes, blame it on me. I'm trying to kill the Web. Isn't it time to move on? Didn't we move on from the Apple II? Didn't we move on from DOS? Didn't we move on from Windows 3.11? Can't you see a day when we move on from the Web and get something even more fantastic? I can. Dave Winer can. Why not you? [via The Scobleizer Weblog]

If you kill the Web en route to getting us a Portable Execution Junction box from Microsoft, I think you would have served mankind pretty damned well. We won't have to gripe about Web 1.0 (Browser Driven Web) because we would be well into Web 2.0 and beyond (which doesn?t define the Web experience predominantly via browsing).

WinFS Synchronization Architecture

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:55:27 GMT

Here is an architecture diagram that sheds light on the WinFS synchronization architecture. There are two things that caught my attention when looking at this diagram:

Third Party integration points are clearly identified
No mention of SyncML (although worst case this could be bootstrapped by a third party SyncML Adapter).

I hope other diagrams will be are clear as this, especially the ones relating to actual storage :-)

Replace and defend -- Contd

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 20:58:52 GMT

Reading the Longhorn SDK docs is a disorienting experience. Everything's familiar but different. Consider these three examples:

[Full story: Replace and defend via Jon's Radio]

"Replace & Defend" is certainly a strategy that would have awakened the entire non Microsoft Developer world during the recent PDC event. I know these events are all about preaching to the choir (Windows only developers), but as someone who has worked with Microsoft technologies as an ISV since the late 80's there is something about this events announcements that leave me concerned.

Ironically these concerns aren't about the competitive aspects of their technology disruptions, but more along the lines of how Microsoft (I hope inadvertently) generates the kinds of sentiments echoed in the comments thread from Scobles recent "How to hate Microsoft" post. As indicated in my response to this post, I don't believe Microsoft is as bad or evil as is instinctively assumed in many quarters, but I can certainly understand why they are hated by others which is really unfortunate, especially bearing in mind that they have done more good than harm to date (in my humble opinion) .

Anyway, back to my concerns post PDC which I break down as follows:

Disruptive assaults on existing standards with the only benefit being Microsoft platform centricity. Jon Udell addressed this in his "Replace and Defend" post (which kicked of this post), and I see exactly what he sees here, and I don't see any reason for this approach whatsoever. Even if one of these standards was deficient what stops the Microsoft from addressing these deficiencies, and then should the W3C's standards acceptance and ratification process bogs things down at least let the industry know you gave it openness a chance but have to move on etc..
Gradual obsolescence of existing Microsoft standards which used to provide interfaces for 3rd party ISV partners, and replacing these with totally closed infrastructure implementations that bind to Microsoft products only. A good example is WinFS, I believe in the unified data storage concept, it's a vision that I've believed in for many years, but there is no notion from any PDC presentation or Blog that I have read so far (I aggregate a serious number of feeds) that Microsoft is committed to an architectural strategy that enables 3rd party ISVs to hook their data stores and data sources into this storage infrastructure - it's simply about Yukon (SQL Server) and that's basically it.

WinFS needs to architecturally separate the System Provider from the Data Provider (pretty much the OLE-DB architecture) with Microsoft naturally providing reference System Provider (pretty much what was demonstrated at PDC) and Data Provider (ADO.NET, OLE DB, and ODBC) implementations. Third parties can choose to produce custom WinFS Service or Data Providers which serve their data access needs. It's impractical to want to force every non SQL Server customer over to SQL Server in order them to exploit WinFS, and I certainly hope this isn't the definitive strategy at Microsoft.

WinFS validates Unified Storage Vision

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 18:34:00 GMT

I have been following the PDC event and information outflows with very keen interest. The newly published document from Microsoft re. WinFS is certainly interesting reading, especially as it articulates a vision that validates our Virtuoso universal server (as far as data storage goes). The excerpt below pretty much sums this up:

Every year, as new hard disks get bigger and faster, applications catch up by producing more data. Hard disks are commonly used to store personal information: correspondence, personal contacts, and work documents. These items are currently treated as separate entities, yet they are interrelated on some level; and it's no surprise that e-mail comes from your personal contacts list and influences the work that you should be doing and hence determines the documents that you'll create. When you have a large number of items, it is important to have a flexible and efficient mechanism to search for particular items based on their properties and content. Up until now, storage mechanisms like Outlook