Daniel’s Blog

Intro

In the past I have written and talked about the fact that URIs are the key (or ticket) towards making data more semantic (aka “meaningful”). A URI is a unique label for a data object, by giving a unique label to the object you can build relations up with that object, making the object more defined and more meaningful.

Except a URI is a lot more than a simple label, and this is because of the Linked Data rule of making URIs “gettable” via HTTP. Because the URI is available via HTTP it can be seen as a data structure which describes how to get to a specific data source.

And now to talk about Data Source Names (DSNs).

Data Source Names

A DSN is a data structure which represents the connection to a specific data source, this has traditionally been within the database realm and more specifically with ODBC. However, it does not have to be strictly ODBC nor strictly database… it could be any data source of any kind.

Data Source Names are synonymous with Uniform Resource Identifiers

You would have noticed that the description of the Linked Data URI and the description of the DSNs are very similar, in fact, there is no difference at all! Therefore on the Linked Data Web a Uniform Resource Identifier is a Data Source Name. Simple as that!

Now you can start to see what Kingsley, I and the rest of OpenLink are trying to convey when we mention WODBC. The Linked Data Web is fully explainable using existing database terminology (e.g. URIs are DSNs), which is then built up creating a web of data connections, establishing Web Open DataBase Connnectivity.

Kingsley gives a description of WODBC and a comparison with the traditional ODBC.