[wdmmg-discuss] Failed to port datastore to RDF, will go Mongo

Wed Nov 24 10:56:20 UTC 2010

(reposting to list):

Hi all, 

As an action from OGDCamp, Rufus and I agreed that we should resume porting WDMMG to RDF in order to make the data model more flexible and to allow a merger between WDMMG, OffenerHaushalt and similar other projects. 

After a few days, I'm now over the whole idea of porting WDMMG to RDF. Having written a long technical pro/con email before (that I assume contained nothing you don't already know), I think the net effect of using RDF would be the following: 

* Lots of coolness, sucking up to linked data people.
* Further research regarding knowledge representation.

vs.

* Unstable and outdated technological base. No triplestore I have seen so far seemed on par with MySQL 4. 
* No freedom wrt to schema, instead modelling overhead. Spent 30 minutes trying to find a predicate for "Euro".
* Scares off developers. Invested 2 days researching this, which is how long it took me to implement OHs backend the first time around. Project would need to be sustained through linked data grad students.
* Less flexibility wrt to analytics, querying and aggregation. SPARQL not so hot.
* Good chance of chewing up the UI, much harder to implement editing.

I normally enjoy learning new stuff. This is just painful. Most of the above points are probably based on my ignorance, but it really shouldn't take a PhD to process some gov spending tables. 

I'll now start a mongo effort because I really think this should go schema-free + I want to get stuff moving. If you can hold off loading Uganda and Israel for a week that would of course be very cool, we could then try to evaluate how far this went. Progress will be at: http://bitbucket.org/pudo/wdmmg-core 

Friedrich