Oracle, Semantics, and Search

January 17, 2009

Secure Enterprise Search (SES10g) has dropped off my radar screen. Nothing new at Oracle World last fall. I did attend an Oracle briefing at one of the lame duck conferences I hit last year, but recently–zip. I knew that Oracle had explored a tie up with Siderean Software, a now quiet company near Los Angeles. I also picked up some intel about a conversation and test with the Bitext wizards but nothing lately.

I read in Semantic Focus here that Oracle is moving forward with semantics. The article “Semantic Data Storage in Oracle” here is worth a read. I found the information encouraging, but the write up prompted me to do some addled goose type thinking. If you are familiar with this Web log, you know that the “addled goose” phrase signals some questions and few observations.

The point of the article was to tell me that Oracle’s mothership (the Oracle 11g database) provides a platform to store the semantic Webby stuff called RDF and OWL data. RDF, in case you have forgotten, is semantic Web speak for Resource Description Framework. It is a framework for describing and interchanging metadata. More info is here. OWL is not part of the Hooter’s logo. The acronym means Web Ontology Language. More info is here. For me the most important comment was:

It [Oracle 11g] allows efficient storage, loading and querying of semantic data. Queries are enhanced by adding relationships (ontologies) to data and evaluated on the basis of semantics. Data storage is in the form of RDF triples (Subject, Predicate, Object) and can scale up to millions of triples. The triples stored in the semantic data store are modeled as a graphed structure. All the data is stored in a single central schema allowing access to users for loading and querying data.

Now my questions:

Where does Secure Enterprise Search fit into this semantic data picture?
With performance an issue, how will the inclusion of potentially verbose information affect retrieval?
What tools will Oracle provide to make use of these new data types?

We’ve been stuff all sorts of information into database management systems for years. Maybe I am missing something, but I don’t see the type of breakthrough that companies like Aster Data and InfoBright are delivering whether the data are or are not “semantic”. One final question: What’s going on with SES10g?

Stephen Arnold, January 17, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, Enterprise, News, Semantic

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.