[om-list] The Semantic Web

[Mark Butler]

Luke is right - the semantic web can be used both to obtain data and present data, but is decidedly non-optimal for an internal representation.  We need a real object oriented database for that.  Most of the semantic web will be an XML presentation layer on top of internal databases, anyway - the potential lies in having a common global standard for semantic information someday.

High performance applications will generally use other formats and protocols internally - in memory operations are easily orders of magnitude faster than HTTP transactions.  No XML database worthy of the name stores its data in native XML format - the XML has to be parsed, indexed, and stored in a database of some kind to be of general use.

- Mark