Roberto V. Zicari, editor of ODBMS.org has recently published an interview with a practicing data scientist John Goodwin about using semantic web technologies such as RDF to cope with large amount of data in disparate sources.

Says Goodwin:

Linked data is great for data integration – a common data language makes it easy (or rather easier) to bring a number of disparate datasets together. It is also more flexible than traditional relational Database technologies. (…) I find graphs to be the most natural way to think about data.

But as we pointed it out before, enterprise’s mission critical data resides in relational databases. The very reason why Slashdb was created is to make it more accessible. SlashDB is not a database but thin graph and document facades over relational data, conveniently delivered through a REST/HTTP interface in various representations.

Take a look at this example from our demo website, which exposes a database for an online music store.

Customer record can adressed as follows:
http://demo.slashdb.com/db/Chinook/Customer/CustomerId/1.html

From there you can traverse along the graph’s edge to the Invoice table to show invoices related to that customer:
http://demo.slashdb.com/db/Chinook/Customer/CustomerId/1/Invoice.html,

You can continue doing that to Invoice Line items then on to Track to see which songs this customer has purchased:
http://demo.slashdb.com/db/Chinook/Customer/CustomerId/1/Invoice/InvoiceLine/Track.html

Take a pause and think how much more natural this feels than writing a SQL code to say nothing of the fact that it easily fits in a browser’s address bar.

In SlashDB your journey through data begins at the root node of the graph /db.html where links to multiple databases can be provided (not shown in public demo).

At the moment SlashDB provides XML, JSON, CSV and HTML representations but RDF format is not yet supported. Please drop us line if this feature would be of interest to you. If you are interested in trying SlashDB with your databases, just head over to GET /db page here to request a free trial.

To read the full interview: On Linked Data. Interview with John Goodwin. | ODBMS Industry Watch.

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