Re: [xml-dev] Semantic Web permathread, iteration n+1 (was Re: [ xml-dev] InfoWorld agrees with Elliote Rusty Harold)

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Ever try to query a database for which you have no schema? 
> 
> Think of hooking up an ad hoc query generator to a distant 
> database that changes from time to time, might be in a different 
> natural language, and so forth.  Metadata starts to look very 
> appealing to the human.  Sometimes you don't want a list of 
> URIs back; you want a report.
> 

One thing that is working its way up to daylight is a standardized way 
(or ways) to ask an RDF server to cough up all the information it knows 
about a given subject.  This gives you a starting point for exploring 
the remote and possibly distributed data store without having to just 
get a dump (which might end up being huge).  It's actually quite 
feasible today.  See URIQA, for example, which was worked out by Patrick 
Stickler of Nokia -

http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html

Cheers,

Tom P