As the
Linked Data memecontinues on it's quest to unravel the mysteries of the
Semantic Webvision, it's quite gratifying to see that
data virtualizationcomprehension: creating "Conceptual Views" into logically organized "Disparate & Heterogeneous
DataSources" via "
ContextLenses" is taking shape, as illustrated in the "
note-to-self" post by
David Provost.
Virtualization of heterogeneous data sources is only achievable if you have a dexterous data model based "Bus" into which the data sources are plugged. RDF has offered such a model for a long time.
When heterogeneous data sources are plugged into an RDF based integration bus e.g., customer records sourced from a variety of tables, across a plethora of databases, you can only end up with true value if the emergent entities from such an effort are coherently linked and (de)referencable; which is what
Linked Data's fundamental preoccupation with dereferencable URIs is all about. Of course, Even when you have all of the above in place, you also need to be able to construct "
ContextLenses" i.e.,
contextdriven views of the
Linked DataMesh (or
Linked DataSpaces).
Additional Diagrams:
1.
Clients of the RDF Bus
2.
RDF Bus Server plugins: Scripts that emit
RDF
3.
RDF Bus Servers: RDF Data Managers (Triple or
Quad Stores)
4.
RDF Bus Servers: Relational to RDF Mappers
(RDF Views, Semantic Covers etc.)
5.
RDF Bus Server plugins: XML to RDF
Mappers
6.
RDF Bus Server plugins: GRDDL based XSLT
stylesheets that emit RDF
7.
RDF Bus Server plugins: Intelligent RDF
Middleware