ISWC14 paper: a hybrid semantic publishing architecture combining XML and RDF
I'm posting here a short summary of the paper I presented at the last International Semantic Web conference in Riva del Garda (ISWC14) together with my colleague Tony Hammond.
The presentation focused on a hybrid data architecture (XML for storage & querying, RDF for modeling & integration) which emerged as the most practical solution during the process of re-engineering the publishing platform that has occurred within our company (Macmillan S&E) over the last few years.
This is the abstract:
This paper presents recent work carried out at Macmillan Science and Education in evolving a traditional XML-based, document-centric enterprise publishing platform into a scalable, thing-centric and RDF-based semantic architecture. Performance and robustness guarantees required by our online products on the one hand, and the need to support legacy architectures on the other, led us to develop a hybrid infrastructure in which the data is modeled throughout in RDF but is replicated and distributed between RDF and XML data stores for efficient retrieval. A recently launched product – dynamic pages for scientific subject terms – is briefly introduced as a result of this semantic publishing architecture.
The paper is available online, and slides from the presentation can be found below.
The ISWC industry track was packed with interesting papers, so I think it's worth taking a look at the online proceedings. The uptake of technology outside academia is always revealing of the many real-world difficulties involved in making something fit within pre-existing work practices and legacy technologies. This is especially true of larger companies, where investment in older technologies (and in people who know about them) can be considerable; hence, upgrades are costly and need to be evaluated more carefully.
This is the sort of background that led me and my colleagues at Macmillan to opt for a hybrid solution that combines the power of an established enterprise MarkLogic installation with more cutting-edge data integration approaches based on RDF.
Nature.com subject pages were one of the first products built on top of this architecture. And many more will come: we're still heavily involved in this work, so stay tuned for more developments in this space.
Soon, we will also be releasing our public ontologies online and making available a new and improved version of the nature.com datasets.