[openbiblio-dev] Virtuoso versus 4store

Fri May 13 13:39:43 UTC 2011

I don't know the full scope of the openbiblio project, so take this
with a boulder sized grain of salt.

I wonder if it might be worthwhile to first pursue supporting the
crawling pattern [1] that Owen helpfully cited. In this pattern you
would mint URIs for the resources the project cares about, and make
sure people can resolve them to get back chunks of machine readable
and web friendly data, and that there were links out to other relevant
places. Would this be a good place to start if you are trying to
convince the BL of the utility of Linked Data?

Or was SPARQL support one of your deliverables for the project?

//Ed

[1] http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/#htoc84

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> There has been recent discussion with Will Waites about what we use as
> our backend for openbiblio.
>
> Rough summary (Will knows more so I am sure he can add):
>
> 1. We have used 4store and virtuoso. Both have been quite painful to install.
> 2. We switch to virtuoso as default ~ 6 months ago
> 3. We have encountered a show-stopper bug in virtuoso python bindings
> 3 months ago. This is still not resolved AFAIK.
> 4. This necessitated rewriting code to use Virtuoso sparql interface.
> The problem with this is there is no way in Virtuoso to distinguish
> GET from UPDATE/DELETE ops in sparql. We therefore had to shut down
> the sparql API.
> 5. Will experimented with a migration back to 4store a few weeks ago.
> We started a production deployment 2 weeks ago but this was halted
> because resource usage seemed very high (2x16GB store plus api machine
> plus web app machine compared to previous 8GB virtuoso store + 1
> machine for webapp). 4store does appear to require a more complex
> production environment and to be more demanding of resources.
>
> Question: what do we do?
>
> Secondary question: can we abstract the code so it doesn't care which
> backend it is using?
>
> In my opinion we should be cautious about switching away again to 4store:
>
>  * Virtuoso is working
>  * We now have extensive (and tested) documentation on installation
> and deployment
>  * We have experience of Virtuoso working ok.
>
> That said we don't currently have a SPARQL endpoint (if we could
> somehow restrict write ops via SPARQL we'd be ok again ...). IMO this
> isn't a huge deal *if* we a working solr instance and APIs are
> operational but it would be interesting to know what others thought
> here.
>
> Rufus
>
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