[Mulgara-general] OWL API support for Mulgara

[David Legg]

Andrae Muys wrote:
>
>> I'm only just starting to use OWLAPI but it shows a lot of promise.  
>> My only concern so far is how efficiently the API could be 
>> implemented over a remote server.  With SPARQL you can bundle up a 
>> complex query in a single package and let Mulgara handle the best way 
>> to execute it but with OWLAPI I can't see how you can do the same thing.
>
> ... However you are right, we do appear to have a problem the moment 
> we start doing anything mildly complicated
>
> The choice to use a class-hierarchy rather than type-constructors is 
> going to hurt us.  Even with the use of class-based API we might still 
> have been able to work around it, except they've mandated the visitor 
> pattern which I suspect will seal our fate.
>

I have to agree with you Andrae.

I recently had a problem in which I needed to do tens of thousands of 
searches for instances based on particular rdfs:label values.  
Initially, I used a visitor pattern to locate the strings but it 
literally took hours because each search went through every single 
instance.  In the end I used another OWLAPI construction; the 
'BidirectionalShortFormProviderAdapter' which effectively cached each 
string and reduced the whole operation to a few seconds instead of hours.

Fast though this solution is, all I have actually achieved is to create 
a local duplicate of the database in memory and that's not going to 
scale well!

What I'm crying out for is the Semantic web equivalent of the Hibernate 
library... anyone got one handy ;-)

I can't face developing applications by concatenating bits of SPARQL 
strings together and sticking them in DAO objects... that's so 20th century!

- David.