Dear Jim, dear all

May I propose another measuring criteria or facet of the challenge:

Can a user interactively do something useful with the data?

I think that it is great if we can store/retrieve/reason/etc with a billion triples. But, ultimately, one of the challenges should be if users can use it interactively for a useful task.

For this to work storing/retrieving (e.g., SPARQL), reasoning, processing linked data, etc. might be useful prerequisites.

Best

Avi


--- In billiontriples@yahoogroups.com, Jim Hendler <hendler@...> wrote:
>
> All-
> Peter feels that we now have the collection and distribution of the
> triples underway, which means he gets to make me do some work finally...
> My role at the moment is to figure out what we would like to make
> the challenge part of the challenge be,
> Here are some thoughts, I welcome feedback
> We see four, very non disjoint audiences for the challenge (in
> fact, Peter, me, and most of the people on this list are in at least
> several categories):
> Triple store developers, linked data technology developers, Semantic
> Web researchers interested in scalable reasoning, ontology-based
> research groups
>
> Here are some of my thoughts with respect to these
>
> A - Triple Store Developers
> We do not want this to be a "triple store shootout" in the sense
> of who can process a query fastest or such. We don't see that
> competition as being all that useful at a time when people are still
> very much in development mode. Rather, we would like the outcome of
> this event to be a realization in the outside world that triple-stores
> can and do handle these sorts of numbers (the DB folks still say
> "triple stores break at a million triples" at conferences I go to - I
> have no idea where they get that, but let's push it up a few orders of
> magnitude!!)
> So at the moment my thinking on this area is that we would like to
> give you folks bragging rights for being able to support systems other
> people develop (i.e. any of you who host this data and make it
> available via SPARQL should be listed as "winners" in some way)
> I also think that if some interesting, large, and complex SPARQL
> queries are developed against this dataset (say including filters and
> optionals), then those would become useful benchmarks, so we would
> like to find a way to encourage the sharing of these (maybe for a
> future date when a benchmarking shootout would be more appropriate)
>
> B - Linked data technology developers
> We write a lot about the Semantic Web as being the Web of linked
> data, but to date, in practice, most of that data is either within an
> enterprise or locked in a particular application. We are purposely
> designing this dataset to be very heterogeneous, but with many
> connections between pieces, so it should be a great dataset for
> showing off tools that can exploit the dataweb.
> In this area we are thinking of having some goals like "visualize
> (or browse) the dataweb", Datamining of this sort of data, etc. --
> seems to us this is a ripe area for a challenge
>
> C - SW researchers interested in scalable reasoning
> The data set we are developing will include a (large) number of
> triples tied to FOAF, DOAP and other "small o" ontologies. We also
> have a lot of data that will be made available that was crawled from
> microformats (where the "semantics" are well specified). This is thus
> an ideal proving grounds for the "little semantics goes a long way"
> philosophy, and thus this also seems like an appropriate challenge area
>
> D - Ontology research
> Big A-Box, you got it! Show us something.
>
> So, I think we will have the "competition" be fairly unspecified - we
> will identify several areas of interest from the above and work out
> how to tie that into an "announcible" competition.
>
> I welcome, NEED, your feedback on this
> -Jim H.
>
>
>
>
> "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would
> it?." - Albert Einstein
>
> Prof James Hendler http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
> Tetherless World Constellation Chair
> Computer Science Dept
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY 12180
>