Today I presented a HOT topic about Ontologies and NoSQL as a Tech Talk at Optilab d.o.o.. At this company I work as a Junior Researcher and Tech Talks are our internal lectures to other co-workers. Typical lessons normally consist of something that one of us works on or he would just like to share knowledge.
The main problem I tried to address in my talk was:
- WHAT NoSQL IS MISSING FOR GENERAL USE
- HOW ONTOLOGY CAN HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM
I see an ontology as an additional layer over NoSQL database. It can provide nice runtime-customizable schema and SPARQL/Update language to easily manipulate data. I believe this is especially important when combining data from different sources – after some time no one will know what relation or concept types the database contains. Another thing is SPARQL support – through an endpoint a user can run some analysis. Furthermore, when having data represented by an ontology, we can quickly change the database to another appropriate store, which cannot be so easily done between raw NoSQL – for example: try to straightforwardly transfer data from key-value to graph data store :).