2. Presented by Gentre Dozier and Spencer Dille http://www.information- management.com/newsletters/database_metadata_unstructured_data_triple_store- 10020158-1.html

3. What is a Triplestore? A triplestore is designed for storing information in many short pieces called triples. Each triple represents a subject-predicate-object relationship and is stored in a graph based model. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is an abstract model in which a triple is encoded. Take this example statement: “Grass is the color green.” How would you store this information in a triple? Here the Subject is ‘Grass’ The Predicate is ‘is the color’ (think of this as a Column) The Object is ‘Green’

4. Do Triplestores offer an advantage over RDMS? No need to create schemas. No need to link tables because you can have one to many relationships directly. Can create new Predicates (again, think columns) on the fly. You can also run queries off of this data, just like in a relational database model.

5. Standardization There are several standards for triple stores proposed on the W3 Consortium: RDF, RDFS, OWL, and SPARQL. In order to gain large scale acceptance, standardization is critical. Standardization is what made SQL popular.

6. Unstructured Data Unstructured data is becoming more and more common. (email, spreadsheet, etc.) How do we best handle unstructured data? Relational databases are not the answer. So do you use XML or RDF? XML is not as flexible as RDF in dealing with graphs.

7. Need for standardized metadata Metadata helps describe the content of data files. This is extremely important when you are talking about unstructured data. Creating a standard will help push forward the use of triple stores Google recently purchased the biggest RDF-based encyclopedia on the Web and formally announced that it will use RDF embedded in Web pages. Yahoo and Microsoft are also following in their footsteps.

8. Summary The author believes that triple stores offer more flexibility and is more powerful to write complex queries. In the short term Relational Databases and Triple Stores will live side by side. Many companies are already using Triple Stores on top of their existing relational databases.