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

Mon Nov 29 17:19:17 UTC 2010

Thanks for that writeup Friedrich, very interesting.

Two things:

1) I'd love to see your long technical pro/con email from before. I
can't find it in the mailing list archive, did you send it there?

2) I'm wondering if a leightweight linked CVS or linked JSON can help.
By this I mean using URLs as attribute values, and even keys, for
fields which refer to other types (for which there is an ontology, or
you feel like making one). That would provide the forward compatible
hook, that William refers to.

Francis

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 11:56:20AM +0100, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:
> (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 * Unstable and outdated technological base.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
> 
> 
> 
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