A few months ago here I wrote SPARQL and Big Data (and NoSQL): How to pursue the common ground? followed by Selling RDF technology to Big Data, where I put forth some theories about how to describe the value of RDF technology to people who may or may not have heard of it but were clearly interested in the hot buzz phrase “Big Data.” To practice what I preached—or perhaps to just preach to a new audience—I submitted an article to the new academic journal Big Data. They’ve just just published their first issue, which includes my article “What Do RDF and SPARQL bring to Big Data Projects?” (pdf). The same issue also has interesting articles journal editor Edd Dumbill and the first of what will be a regular column by Jim Hendler; I haven’t checked out the other articles yet.

My article provides a basic introduction to RDF and SPARQL, playing up the RDF support by IBM’s DB2, Oracle’s Spatial product, and Cray’s uRiKA, because these companies are well-known brand names in the world of large-scale data processing. And, except for a reference to the Linked Open Data Cloud and the possibility of private linked data clouds, there is no mention of Linked Data and no use of the phrase “semantic web,” in keeping with the my ideas described in “Selling RDF technology to Big Data.”

The paperwork I filled out on the way to having the article published led me to believe that this would be one of those expensive, tightly-controlled academic journals, but it looks like it’s being published with a Creative Commons CC-BY license, which was great to see. I look forward to their future issues.