That fact that RDF expresses everything using the same simple three-part data structure has usually been a great strength, but in the case of ordered lists (or RDF collections) it’s pretty messy. The specification defines a LISP-like way of using triples to identify, for each position in a list, what the first member is and what list has the rest of them after that. When saying “and here are the rest” for every member of the list, you don’t want to have to come up with a…

The recent publication of RDF 1.1 specifications fifteen years and three days after RDF 1.0 became a Recommendation has not added many new features to RDF, although it has made a few new syntaxes official, and there were no new documents about the SPARQL query language. The new Recommendations did clean up a few odds and ends, and one bit of cleanup officially removes an annoying impediment to straightforward querying of strings.

In the typical classification of NoSQL databases, the “graph” category is one that was not covered in the “NoSQL Databases for RDF: An Empirical Evaluation” paper that I described in my last blog entry. (Several were “column-oriented” databases, which I always thought sounded like triple stores—the “table” part of they way people describe these always sounded to me like a stretched metaphor designed to appeal to relational database developers.) A…

A little over a year ago, in a blog entry titled SPARQL and Big Data (and NoSQL), I wrote this:

I think I’ve figured it out. (This is a follow-up to my previous post SPARQL and Big Data (and NoSQL): How to pursue the common ground?) Here’s how to sell the Semantic Web and Linked Data visions to the Big Data folk: don’t. Sell them on RDF technology.

I think it’s obvious that SPARQL and other RDF-related technologies have plenty to offer to the overlapping worlds of Big Data and NoSQL, but this doesn’t seem as obvious to people who focus on those areas. For example, the program for this week’s Strata conference makes no mention of RDF or SPARQL. The more I look into it, the more I see that this flexible, standardized data model and query language align very well with what many of those people are trying to do.

I thought it was pretty big news for the semantic web world when IBM announced that release 10.1 of their venerable DB2 database manager could function as an RDF triplestore, but it seems that few others—not even, apparently, IBM staff responsible for marketing semantic technology—agreed with me. More on this below.