Hi, I would like to introduce myself. I'm student and thesis of my work is to prove that semantic technologies are ready for commercial use. I create this analysis in cooperation with one company which is interested in the technology, but it's necessary for sem. technologies to be competitive.
Therefore, please compare the technology with other technologies which are used nowadays( performance,effectivity, stability, fast development and price of eg. relation databases(Oracle, MS SQL), Casandra.. in comparison to Semantic databases etc. I know about many scientific products (DBPedia) and also some small business products( small in means that maybe only 1% of the product run on semantic technologies and the rest is still old fashioned one). I want to realize whether the uninterest in the semantic technologies is because of low maturity and big performance issue or because of lack of knowledge of programmers. The company wants to create systems based on semantic technologies but from the bottom. Not just the part of system ( e.g. only FOAF), but the whole data structure and everything around. Maybe it will be bit restrictive but company already choose OWLIM to work with therefore any experience is appreciated. Have on mind that the main comodity for the company is money! They need 100% stable system which can handle millions of triples, thousands of requests per day + some basic reasoning(espacially forward inferencing - therefore OWLIM) and development have to be fast enough + added value for customer which will give company advantage on market. Simply it has to have equal or better ratio than current products/technologies. Thank you for answers, Marek
Edit: Probably I have to be more specific, because this discussion is going into way I didn't mean to go.
- You are mentioning publishing RDF data on web but it was NOT my point. According my quick research majority of webpages don't provide RDF data. Maybe in future they will be, but now they don't.
- According to me, SW has two major advantages over relation database systems - ease of integration and reasoning which can bring added value to stored data but... there are some issues(mentioning later)
- You can do reasoning over data which is big advantage of SW, but if you try LUBM 1000 reasoning with OWL2-RL ruleset you will see what I'm talking about.(hours of reasoning on average machine) I know it is just generic test and you don't need to use OWL2-RL ruleset, but as some measurment it serves well.
- Integration is really faster and better, but if I will have to spend hours of optimization to let things run fast, is it worth it?
- Maturity - e.g. I ran SPARQL query SELECT COUNT() WHERE { conditions }, it returns number 12000. Then I ran INSERT someTriple WHERE { sameCondition } and I checked it with SELECT COUNT() WHERE { someTriple } and it return 11800. Why 200 triples didn't INSERT when the condition of inserting is the same as condition of counting? Bug.
- Maturity - Using MINUS in sparql takes absolutely insane time
- Sesame Console on Java 7? I can't run it.
- According to standard there were more ways how to do some query, but only few worked correctly ...etc.
- I'm mentioning only wrong experience on purpose. Just to explain that these basic features of the technology still don't behave absolutely bug-free. I DO NOT say everything is buggy, unstable etc. This is just opposite view of some comments which seems to me as if everything is fine with the technology and I'm the wrong which is asking such question.
Maybe it seems so but I'm NOT against technology. (I'm doing it because I truly like the way SW works ) I just want to point out some things and start productive discussion about the topic. Pls, don't consider it as flamewar, but as productive discussion with all pros and cons with some conclusion. Thank you for all answers (especially Signified's and database_animal's answer)