Fullsix Blog

Scott Hanselman just published his 97th podcast, titled ADO.NET “Astoria” Data Services with Shawn Wildermuth. It’s a great listen. Shawn Wildermuth is the author of the highly acclaimed book Pragmatic ADO.NET.

Some of the highlights of the show are:

• Why “Astoria” does not expose your database to the web
• How Linq fits in the picture
• The fear of SQL in URIs
• A Silverlight client for “Astoria”

I was talking about “Astoria” with Marco the other day, and he correctly pointed that it doesn’t support SPARQL, which is now a W3C standard query language for RDF. As stated in this post on the “Astoria” Team Blog,

“What happened with RDF?

The May 2007 CTP also included support for RDF. While we got positive comments about the fact we supported it, we didn’t see any early user actually using it and we haven’t seen a particular popular scenario where RDF was a must-have. So we are thinking that we may not include RDF as a format in the first release of Astoria, and focus on the other 3 formats (which are already a bunch from the development/testing perspective).

My personal take is that while I understand how RDF fits in the picture of the semantic web and related tools, the semantic web goes well beyond a particular format. The point is to have well-defined, derivable semantics from services. I believe that Astoria does this independently of the format being used. That, combined with the fact that we didn’t see a strong demand for it, put RDF lower in our priority lists for formats. “

So, maybe it won’t happen in the first release, but the “Astoria” team is planning to support RDF. The question is, will they support SPARQL as well?