As is fitting for the season, I will editorialize a bit about what has gone before and what is to come.
Sir Tim said it at WWW08 in Beijing — linked data and the linked data web is the semantic web and the Web done right.
The grail of ad hoc analytics on infinite data has lost none of its appeal. We have seen fresh evidence of this in the realm of data warehousing products, as well as storage in general.
The benefits of a data model more abstract than the relational are being increasingly appreciated also outside the data web circles. Microsoft's Entity Frameworks technology is an example. Agility has been a buzzword for a long time. Everything should be offered in a service based business model and should interoperate and integrate with everything else — business needs first; schema last.
Not to forget that when money is tight, reuse of existing assets and paying on a usage basis are naturally emphasized. Information, as the asset it is, is none the less important, on the contrary. But even with information, value should be realized economically, which, among other things, entails not reinventing the wheel.
It is against this backdrop that this year will play out.
As concerns research, I will again quote Harry Halpin at ESWC 2008: "Men will fight in a war, and even lose a war, for what they believe just. And it may come to pass that later, even though the war were lost, the things then fought for will emerge under another name and establish themselves as the prevailing reality" [or words to this effect].
Something like the data web, and even the semantic web, will happen. Harry's question was whether this would be the descendant of what is today called semantic web research.
I heard in conversation about a project for making a very large metadata store. I also heard that the makers did not particularly insist on this being RDF-based, though.
Why should such a thing be RDF-based? If it is already accepted that there will be ad hoc schema and that queries ought to be able to view the data from all angles, not be limited by having indices one way and not another way, then why not RDF?
The justification of RDF is in reusing and linking-to data and terminology out there. Another justification is that by using an RDF store, one is spared a lot of work and tons of compromises which attend making an entity-attribute-value (EAV, i.e., triple) store on a generic RDBMS. The sem-web world has been there, trust me. We came out well because we put all inside the RDBMS, lowest level, which you can't do unless you own the RDBMS. Source access is not enough; you also need the knowledge.
Technicalities aside, the question is one of proprietary vs. standards-based. This is not only so with software components, where standards have consistently demonstrated benefits, but now also with the data. Zemanta and OpenCalais serving DBpedia URIs are examples. Even in entirely closed applications, there is benefit in reusing open vocabularies and identifiers: One does not need to create a secret language for writing a secret memo.
Where data is a carrier of value, its value is enhanced by it being easy to repurpose (i.e., standard vocabularies) and to discover (i.e., data set metadata). As on the web, so on the enterprise intranet. In this lies the strength of RDF as opposed to proprietary flexible database schemes. This is a qualitative distinction.
In hoc signo vinces.
In this light, we welcome the voiD (VOcabulary of Interlinked Data), which is the first promise of making federatable data discoverable. Now that there is a point of focus for these efforts, the needed expressivity will no doubt accrete around the voiD core.
For data as a service, we clearly see the value of open terminologies as prerequisites for service interchangeability, i.e., creating a marketplace. XML is for the transaction; RDF is for the discovery, query, and analytics. As with databases in general, first there was the transaction; then there was the query. Same here. For monetizing the query, there are models ranging from renting data sets and server capacity in the clouds to hosted services where one pays for processing past a certain quota. For the hosted case, we just removed a major barrier to offering unlimited query against unlimited data when we completed the Virtuoso Anytime feature. With this, the user gets what is found within a set time, which is already something, and in case of needing more, one can pay for the usage. Of course, we do not forget advertising. When data has explicit semantics, contextuality is better than with keywords.
For these visions to materialize on top of the linked data platform, linked data must join the world of data. This means messaging that is geared towards the database public. They know the problem, but the RDF proposition is still not well enough understood for it to connect.
For the relational IT world, we offer passage to the data web and its promise of integration through RDF mapping. We are also bringing out new Microsoft Entity Framework components. This goes in the direction of defining a unified database frontier with RDF and non-RDF entity models side by side.
For OpenLink Software, 2008 was about developing technology for scale, RDF as well as generic relational. We did show a tiny preview with the Billion Triples Challenge demo. Now we are set to come out with the real thing, featuring, among other things, faceted search at the billion triple scale. We started offering ready-to-go Virtuoso-hosted linked open data sets on Amazon EC2 in December. Now we continue doing this based on our next-generation server, as well as make Virtuoso 6 Cluster commercially available. Technical specifics are amply discussed on this blog. There are still some new technology things to be developed this year; first among these are strong SPARQL federation, and on-the-fly resizing of server clusters. On the research partnerships side, we have an EU grant for working with the OntoWiki project from the University of Leipzig, and we are partners in DERI's Líon project. These will provide platforms for further demonstrating the "web" in data web, as in web-scale smart databasing.
2009 will see change through scale. The things that exist will start interconnecting and there will be emergent value. Deployments will be larger and scale will be readily available through a services model or by installation at one's own facilities. We may see the start of Search becoming Find, like Kingsley says, meaning semantics of data guiding search. Entity extraction will multiply data volumes and bring parts of the data web to real time.
Exciting 2009 to all.