WWW 2008
Following my return from WWW 2008 in Beijing, I will write a series of blog posts discussing diverse topics that were brought up in presentations and conversations during the week.
Linked data was our main interest in the conference and there was a one day workshop on this, unfortunately overlapping with a day of W3C Advisory Committee meetings. Hence Tim Berners-Lee, one of the chairs of the workshop, could not attend for most of the day. Still, he was present to say that "
Linked open data is the
semantic web and the web done as it ought to be done."
For my part, I will draw some architecture conclusions from the different talks and extrapolate about the requirements on database platforms for linked data.
Chris Bizer predicted that 2008 would be the year of data web search, if 2007 was the year of SPARQL. This may be the case, as linked data is now pretty much a reality and the questions of discovery become prevalent. There was a birds-of-a-feather session on this and I will make some comments on what we intend to explore in bridging between the text index based semantic web search engines and SPARQL.
Andy Seaborne convened a birds-of-a-feather session on the future of SPARQL. Many of the already anticipated and implemented requirements were confirmed and a few were introduced. A separate blog post will discuss these further.
From the various discussions held throughout the conference, we conclude that plug-and-play operation with the major semantic web frameworks of Jena, Sesame, and Redland, is our major immediate-term deliverable. Our efforts in this direction thus far are insufficient and we will next have these done with the right supervision and proper interop testing. The issues are fortunately simple but doing things totally right require some small server side support and some JDBC/ODBC tweaks, so to the interested, we advise to wait for an update to be published on this blog.
I further had a conversation with Andy Seaborne about using Jena reasoning capabilities with Virtuoso and generally the issues of "impedance mismatch" between reasoning and typical database workloads. More on this later.