Tuesday, 5/22/2007
4:15 PM - 4:45 PM
Level: Technical - Intermediate

DATA-GRID’s DBMS 2.0 is the first commercial implementation of a DBMS based on the W3C’s OWL model.  OWL is used as the schema definition language for the DBMS.   The DBMS stores OWL objects, not relational tuples or sets of RDF triples.  This makes the system familiar and simple:

For the database schema designer, OWL class diagrams are very similar to UML diagrams.

For the programmer building web applications, he works in a uniform object world.  His user interface is composed of objects, his programming language uses objects, and, for the first time, his database uses objects.  He can store Java, C#, Ruby, etc. objects directly in the database without using a mapping layer to decompose them into tuples or sets of tuples.  And relationships between objects, whether they are 1:1, 1:n, or N:M can be handled directly by the database without the work-arounds that old relational models require — e.g., dummy linking tables to model M:N relationships.

All of this dramatically simplifies the development of database-centric web applications.  And if David H Hannson, inventor of Ruby on Rails, is correct, nearly 60% of mainstream applications are simple CRUD applications: Create, Read, Update a Database.

This demonstration will compare the implementation of a Ruby on Rails application using MySQL plus the Rails object-to-relational mapping layer, versus a direct implementation in OWL objects.

Tom Atwood
Tom Atwood is the CEO of Data-Grid, a developer of DBMS software based on the new OWL standard for representing meaning in Web 3.0 — the Semantic Web.