[RDF] rdfdb

[Stefan Andersson]

Yo!

> > I should mention right away that Jonas and me have slightly different
> > ambitions when it comes to WRAF. Jonas is more interested in the
> > metadata processing and cross-linking aspects. Myself, I am a bit more
> > concerned with the presentation/serialization aspects a.k.a. 'content'.
> 
> I think of the SDS as the next step, after we got the engine working.
> But the enginge shoule definitly be ready for SDS. And I don't think it's
> to early to start thinking about SDS.

Yeah. I think I've changed my ambitions a bit. Right now it feels like
the SDS is simply too big a munch. 

On a historical note: Jonas and I made a prototypish SDS based on
Template Toolkit. (That is, Jonas hacking it, and I stood behind him
cheering wildly and handing him Cola. Something like that...)
Unfortunately it took somewhere around 1.500 database queries to build a
single page, even with simple caching of triples. It's clear that
multi-level caching has to be an integral part of the platform for
anything like it to ever be useable. Or anything RDF at all, I'd say...
Jonas'll digress, I'm sure... ;-)

But even if the prototype took 90 seconds to build a simple page, it was
damn cool to se it done at all.

The point was, that the prototype took a model, and serialized it into
HTML, based on the Schema definition, a context model, and HTML template
declarations on resource and class (with multiple inheritance) level,
dependant on the context model.

So - in such few words: You told the prototype what object you wanted to
see, and in what context, (context being whatewer you choose it to be,
we tested it with 'view' vs. 'edit', but it could have been 'HTML',
'XML', 'WML'... or of course both simultaneous) - and the prototype
found all candidate templates and elected one based on closest match
with context specifications. On a per-resource basis. With multiple
inheritance. Oh, I already said that.

Way nifty! But way tooo slow, alas. But that is one of the things we
hope to achieve with the all new-and-improved WRAF... 
 
> But I would love to use Wraf for many things even without the SDS
> interface.

>From now, I'll concentrate on working on the 'application' layer, that
is - try to find some really cool [killer] applications for WRAF and
WRAF-like application frameworks. The SOAP/WORF thing just gotta get
coded. And I'll look into what can be done with the Mozilla stuff. And I
want to make a database-to-RDF Schema converter and interface. And we
need a reimplementation of the schema editor to support the multi-model
architecture of WRAF... and I can think of a dozen other nifty stuffs
just lying there.

> > (The things Jonas won't let me call Serialization Description
> > Schemas...) :-)
> 
> I made a more detaild response later. The reaction was mostly of the
> presentation of SDS.

Ah, that came from our marketing department. ;-D
ASP - Acronyms Sounds Posh.
 
> > But Christian raised an issue. We should not call our interface to
> > relational databases 'RDFDB', not in coding, and not in presenting it.
> 
> That's like not calling PostgreSQL an SQL server, because M$ choose bold
> names.

Naah. That's like not calling PostgreSQL 'SQL Server', because it's a
generic term for a class of products.

> I call the present module for the RDF::Service::Interface::DBI::V01

Now THAT's a product name! Almost as cool as 'TI TMS320C64x'. 
I think we should call the DBI interface 'willabrook'! ;-D

Sleep tight! 
/Stefan