As I continue my quest to unravel the thinking and vison behind the "Universal Server" branding of Virtuoso, it always simplifies matters when I come across articles that bring context to this vision. 

Tim Berners-Lee provided a keynote at WWW2004 earlier this week, and Paul Ford provided a keynote breakdown from which I have scrapped a poignant excerpt that helps me illuminate Virtuoso's role in the inevitable semantic web.

First off, I see the Semantic Web as a core component of Web 2.x (a minor upgrade of Web 2.0), and I see Virtuoso as a definitive Web 2.0 (and beyond) technology, hence the use today of the branding term "Universal Server". A term that I expect to become a common product moniker in the not too distant future.

The first challenge that confronts the semantic web is the creation of Semantic content. How will the content be created? Ideally, this should come from data, at the end of the day this is a data contextualization process. The excerpt below from Paul's article highlights the point:

Rather than concerning themselves unduly with hewing to existing ontologies, Berners-Lee pushed developers to start using RDF and triples more aggressively. In particular, he wants to see existing databases exported as RDF, with ontologies created ad-hoc to match the structure of that data. Rather than using PHP scripts only to produce HTML, he suggested, create RDF as well. Then, when all of the RDF is aggregated, apply rules and see what happens. "Let's not fall back on handmade markup."

Data in existing databases does not have to be exported as RDF, especially if sensitivity to change is a specific contextual requirement. Naturally, the assumption is made that most databases don't have the ability to produce RDF so an additonal tool would be required to perform the data exports and transformation, and then a separate HTTP server makes this repurposed RDF data accessible over HTTP.

Later in the talk, he described a cascade of Semantic Web connections, postulating that one day, individuals may be able to follow links from a parts catalog to order status, from location to weather to taxes.

The final excerpt (above) outlines the kinds of interactions that the Semantic Web facilitates. The traversal from a "part catalog" to "order status", or from "location" to "weather" to "taxes", illustrates the roles that services and service orchestration will also play in the Semantic Web era.

Thus, we can safely deduce the following about the semantic web:

  1. It has RDF at its foundation
  2. We need to transform existing data into RDF; ideally retaining sensitivity to changes
  3. Allows ontologies to be associated with RDF post generation
  4. RDF graph navigation will be event driven and orchestrated (the cascading effect)
  5. There will be an RDF Query Language (there are several burgeoning ones currently)
  6. HTTP will be the prime transport protocol

I would also like to conclude that what we know today, as the monolithic "point of presence" on the web called a "Web Site" (which infers browsing and page serving), is naturally going to morph into a different kind of "point of presence" that is capable of delivering the following from a single process:

  1. Serve up Semantic Data from existing data sources
  2. Provide execution endpoints for Web Services
  3. Provide an instigation point for events that trigger Service Orchestratio

This is what Virtuoso is all about, and why it is described as a "Universal Server"; a server instance that speaks many protocols, delivering a plethora of functionality (Database, Web Services Platform, Orchestration Engine, and more).