If all you have is a hammer….
A previous boss of mine was well known for coming up with a suitable saying for many a situation. One of his favorites was “When all you have in your toolkit is a hammer - everything starts to look like a nail“
This came to mind whilst reading Ian Davis’ latest report on events at the Web 2.0 Simmit in San Francisco. He was in the session from MySql’s Mårten Mickos. - Read what he has to say and you’ll see what I mean:
I’m baffled.
I’ve just watched Mårten Mickos from MySQL give a 10 minute talk on what he terms the “Great Database in the Sky” almost exactly describing the our community’s vision of a “web of data” while remaining completely ignorant of the semantic web.
To start, he characterised Google as giving unstructured people access to unstructured data whereas MySQL gives structured people access to structured data, meaning that MySQL is targeted towards developers who understand how to structure data “properly”. A strange polarisation in my view, but I guess he’s trying to put clear blue water between the Google approach and the traditional database approach. At Talis, we don’t see this distinction at all and our core platform technology, Bigfoot, unifies structured and unstructured data.
He went on to describe his vision of a skype for database access, combining my data, your data and public data into the next generation OLAP, running a trillion transactions per day. An example could be weather data and he asked what if you could run a SQL statement across all the data sources in the world, something like
SELECT CurrentWindDirection, CurrentWindSpeed FROM AllTheWorldsWeatherStations, MyOwnWeatherStation, MyFriendsWeatherStation.
It’s a noble goal, but he’s not the first to suggest it. It’s also not a future vision because you can do it today with Sparql. It’s at the heart of Bigfoot and there are many other public services that can be used to learn and experiment. You can even query across HTML pages containing embedded structured data.
He followed it up by saying if this were achievable then a whole new generation of web 2.0 applications could be possible. Nothing controversial there, we share the same vision! But we think it’s closer than he does.
What else? Oh yes, he said “we may need a DNS of SQL servers” and that “routing may be an issue”. Another point of agreement, that’s why we built a directory of data collections and services and built web services to route straight into that content.
Then, “how do you make data definitions understandable to others?”. That’s almost like a problem statement for RDF! And yet he didn’t mention it in his list of technologies that might be candidates for the solution: RSS, Atom, Jabber, HTML, HTTP, XML, SQL and SMS.
He concluded his talk with the tagline “The data is the platform” and then took a question from the audience: “How is this different from the semantic web?”.
This is where it became evident that there is a deep disconnect between the traditional database community and the semantic web community. Mårten’s response was rather vague, that this wasn’t as broad as the semantic web and that the semweb includes unstructured data so wasn’t appropriate.
What a shame and what a failure of the semantic web community if the CEO of MySQL AB cannot see how his vision for an interconnected web of data is the same as ours! We must try harder and demonstrate at all levels the value of the semantic web approach to people like Mårten. SWEO and SWIG will help, but the convincing arguments will come from the practical applications of the semantic web being developed to solve real world problems.
Which is why I’m at Talis.
See what I mean.
Ian is right though, Mr Marcos’ limited vision may equally be because of a failure of communication from the semantic web community as his conviction that database technology (but bigger and more distributed) is all we need. I suspect that it would not be too difficult to find some semantic we fundamentalists with with equally strong but opposite opinions.
As with most real world issues, the best solutions occur when [often previously apposing] communities work together.
But if all you think you need in your toolkit is a hammer….
(Hammer image taken by darkmatter uploaded to Flickr)
Technorati Tags: web20summit, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, rdf, mysql
