Better late than never, I’ve finished my paper and PowerPoint slides for the “Relational database integration with RDF/OWL” talk that I gave in Boston. It’s a summary of work I described in this weblog as an ongoing project ([1], [2], [3], [4]), with a little more detail about how I actually did it.

Danny Ayers recently emailed me about a posting by IBM’s Lee Feigenbaum on the W3C’s Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group mailing list. Lee had written about a colleague’s concerns about semantic web technologies, and Danny asked for my thoughts on the issue. I e-mailed him a few paragraphs, and since then I thought that I might as well post them here, with a bit of copy-editing and a few extra thoughts.

I read Elliot Kimber’s series on XML content management software as it came out, and I’ve been re-reading it lately for work project reasons. We work at the same company, where content management issues come up a lot. Content Management Systems is also one of those software categories where many products claim to do it all, but what exactly constitutes “it all” is very vague. Each vendor makes up their own features and puts their own spin on the au courant buzzwords,…

Last week I mentioned the role that D2RQ played in a project I was working on, and I wanted to write a little more about this RDBMS/RDF interface if it’s any help to people who may use it. D2RQ is free, and it’s easy to use in its default setup, but I’m finding that the further you stray from the default setup, the more you can do with it.

I recently asked about the use of RDF/OWL to integrate databases, especially relational databases. The posting received many good comments, but no pointers to the kind of simple example I was hoping to find, so I’ve managed to create one myself.

Earlier this week I wrote about my frustration with metadata as data about data that may never exist—data that ontology designers merely wish that someone else would create around their fabulous ontologies. Lately I’ve become interested in the more difficult but useful idea of designing ontologies around existing data in order to get more value from that data. In theory, RDF/OWL descriptions of separate, related data collections make it easier to use those collections together; how does…