TopQuadrant Webinar on querying and processing RDF
This webinar is interesting, not because it explains RDF exactly(though it touches on that), but because it shows the main differences between querying RDF and querying relational data in a way that won’t scare anyone away.
It should be stressed that his is one vendor’s vision and one vendor’s tool, but the speaker does lay down the boundaries between standard and vendor behaviours quite well, though its worth picking up “LET” as a non-standard keyword. Anyway, its quite a nice tool!
What novices should look for:
- A neat explanation of RDF triples in visual terms.
- On-the-fly invention of new properties for a type without planning ahead or doing any prep work.
- WHERE clauses without a FROM clause – i.e. querying completely unstructured data.
If you are already sold on this RDF thing, then there is also a nice demonstration of using SPARQL for ETL functionality about half way through, which is more than cool. In addition, the RDF visualisation style where the graph is incrementally revealed on-demand is a nice paradigm for viewing graph data.
