Making Semantic Web Data Federation Work

Abstract

Enterprises are drowning in data that they can't find, access, or use. For many years, enterprises have wrestled with the best way to combine all that data into actionable information without building systems that break as schemas evolve. Approaches like warehousing and ETL can be brittle in the face of changing data sources or expensive to create. Data integration at the application level is common but this results in significant complexity in the code. Data-oriented web services attempt to provide reusable sources of integrated data, however these have just added another layer of data access that constrain query and access patterns. This talk will look at how semantic web technologies can be used to make existing data visible and actionable using standards like RDF (data), R2RML (data translation), OWL (schema definition and integration), SPARQL (federated query), and RIF (rules). The semantic web approach takes the data you already have and makes that data available for query and use across your existing data sources. This base capability is an excellent platform for building federated analytics. Topics covered will include: Accessing relational data as RDF using the forthcoming R2RML specification Using SPARQL 1.1 to execute federated queries with the service extension Federated query optimization and design -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alex Miller is a Senior Engineer with Revelytix, building federated semantic web query technology. Prior to Revelytix, Alex was technical lead at Terracotta, an engineer at BEA Systems, and Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Clojure, Java, concurrency, distributed systems, languages, and software design. In St. Louis, Alex is the founder of the Lambda Lounge group for the study of functional and dynamic languages and the Strange Loop developer conference.