SPARQL and Web 2

I just posted this: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bblfish/20051009

Web 2: know your end user

I have had a few questions regarding SPARQL where people are  
misunderstanding the intended end user of this technology. Clearly  
the end user of a SPARQL end point is not your mom and pops, who  
would need a point and click interface on a device adapted to their  
needs. No, the end user are developers. By making your database  
available through a SPARQL end point you are allowing software  
developers to create very powerful apps from your data that may in  
different ways help grow your business. This is what Web 2 is all  
about. Here are a few examples.

Imagine you are Amazon.com. You know that you don't have the  
resources to think of all the different ways you can sell your  
products. By making your catalog available for query in such a  
general way you give some clever programmer a way perhaps to create a  
tool that will end up helping you sell your goods, be they books,  
CDs, electronic equipment or any of the other numerous things amazon  
makes available. Amazon allready does this with their web services.  
SPARQL would just allow them to generalise on that, by making the  
query interface much more flexible, and dramatically reduce the  
bandwidth required to extract information from their database.

Imgine that your are imdb, the amazingly useful Internet Movie  
database. By making all the movie collection available trough SPARQL  
you give some entrepreneurial programmer out there the opportunity to  
create services that you had never yourself considered, or would  
never have been able to put together yourself, as that service may  
require bringing data together from disparate sources that you don't  
control. If this new service that makes use of your data is  
successful, you will see it in your logs, the creator of the service  
will want quality of service guarantees so that he can satisfy his  
own clients, and he may end up paying you some money for that guarantee.

Imagine your are running the French railways and you make all your  
time table info available this way. Other travel services could use  
this information to help people organize trips automatically, and so  
use your trains more often. Others could write some small apps  
specifically aimed at a particular audience whose aims and habits  
they understand well, again increasing the usage of the railway in  
the process.

Imagine you are a hotel chain. Here again the travel agencies could  
find out if your rooms are available, and send you customers... When  
GPS enabled phones become widely available programmers will be able  
to integrate this information to help owners of cell phones locate a  
hotel closest to them that has rooms to their liking.

If you are big or have information that is valuable you can create  
your own ontology by yourself. If you are smaller you can be the  
first to do it, and others will likely follow. Otherwise you can work  
together with partners in your industry to create an ontology that  
reflects the objects your business is about. The beauty of SPARQL is  
that all the developer needs to know is your ontology, and he will  
know how to query your service. SPARQL does not deal with the booking  
part of it, for sure. That is where another technology will have to  
take the relay. But it need not be very complicated. A link pointing  
the user to a "buy" or "book" form would be enough for many cases.



Henry Story

Received on Sunday, 9 October 2005 22:47:39 UTC