[tmql-wg] TMQL Proposal

[Robert Barta]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 06:52:08PM +0000, Kal Ahmed wrote:
> 1) Don't hire students to do a developer's work.
> 2) And how many students know tolog / AsTMa ?

Hehe. I would love to have been present when SQL was suggested the
first time, in a time where most commercial DB products used the
navigation model...

> >Why is Google not using a relational database? Or _any_ other search
> >engine? Why is the publishing company next door not using Oracle, but
> >a (still off-the-shelf) image pattern matching database?

> And how much did they pay to develop them ?

How big is the search engine business (selling search + content +
content intelligence) relative to the RDB business?

And: Why should we pretend that today (2005) we start with NO
experiences in creating languages and data repositories?

> How portable is the knowledge of those systems ?

At these levels of money involved this is handled as a 'secondary'
issue. 

> How can they apply their pattern matching technique to other
> enterprise-level applications ?

I, honestly, do not know, but I know that this now means a major
revenue for them.

> And your point is that implementing a new type of database system tuned 
> to topic maps is in someway a less difficult task ?

We are talking about two things:

  (a) the user (=application engineer's) view of handling and querying a map
  (b) how this is actually implemented

For (a) I strongly believe that a language about S should not use the
concepts from S'. So if we have topics and assertions in maps, then
the query/modification language should revolve to that.

For (b) I am completely open (and may, in fact, 'borrow' ideas from
those who have implemented SQL stores). But I also want people in
industries who have special non-functional requirements (read
speed/size, ...) to have a way to implement TMQL ontop of their
special purpose engines.

> Sorry I don't see how this statement jibes with the one about
> specialising the data store for the task.

Sorry, I lost context.

> Well, what is your argument ? That we should all be developing new data 
> stores and a new query paradigm as well as trying to sell the topic 
> maps meta-model ?

Yes. And no. As I said with (a) and (b) before.

> See you in 10 years when you have something you can sell to a CIO.

Hmm, I would assume that a good working prototype (starting at field
0) would take a reasonable software house 3-5 man months. Most of the
work actually goes into secondary stuff (data types, special functions,
pragmas, ...).

> >Don't you have here then not a double impedance mismatch?
> >
> >    Application -> Kal.SQL.Views -> XQuery?
> >
> 
> Maybe so (I'm not convinced) - but its certainly going to get me from A 
> to B going via C than trying to reinvent the wheel and the road.

See you in 10 years when you have convinced your CIO that this is a
good idea :-))

\rho