Government Computer News

Ex-Homeland Security Department metadata chief Michael Daconta may have trumpeted the Resource Description Framework in his 2003 book The Semantic Web, but for most shops, the benefits of RDF have remained academic.

The good news is that RDF now has a powerful sponsor to help spur adoption. Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif., has released a new database object type for storing RDF data, available with the Oracle Spatial Network Data Model, the company’s software for managing graphs.

“RDF can be a very powerful tool when you’re trying to infer across incomplete information,” said Xavier Lopez, director of spatial technologies for Oracle.

While XML encapsulates data within hierarchies, RDF represents the relationships among objects. A link, called the predicate, hooks a subject (i.e. “John”) to an object (“Suzie”), summarizing the relation between the two (John “is a friend of” Suzie). A “triple,” as this relationship is called, can be used to describe other triples.

“We’ve found that these RDF triples grow very large,” Lopez said. “We have customers with millions of statements.” RDF could be particularly useful for searching. A Structured Query Language query to an RDF data store could return not only exact matches, but close

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