The Digital Enterprise - W3C Graph Data Workshop

Data and data services are increasingly strategically important for businesses. This is reflected in initiatives such as the EU’s Digitising European Industry Initiative, and claims by Mckinsey that by 2025, digitization is expected to contribute $2 trillion to US GDP. Meanwhile, China plans to boost its trillion dollar digital economy to drive job creation in sectors such as big data and artificial intelligence. On 4-6 March 2019, in Berlin, W3C will seek to bridge different communities to create a fresh view of the challenges ahead and the standards that will be needed to overcome them.

The drive to realise the benefits of digitization necessitates addressing the challenge for managing many heterogeneous data sources distributed across the enterprise. Whilst businesses have relied on relational databases for many years, SQL and RDBMS are cumbersome when it comes to rapidly evolving requirements. As a result we have seen the rise of NoSQL databases that address the need for flexible handling of unstructured data. The need to create links across data is fuelling rapid growth in graph database solutions. Unfortunately, there is lack of portability across these solutions.

The W3C workshop will bring together experts in relational databases, property graphs, RDF/Linked Data, big data, and artificial intelligence and machine learning with a view to forging a shared vision for future needs for graph data, and alignment on graph data query languages. We will discuss what’s needed for positioning RDF as an interchange format between different graph database solutions, making RDF easier to use by the vast majority of developers, and opportunities for blending symbolic and statistical approaches for tackling the challenges of real-world data that is incomplete, uncertain, inconsistent and includes errors.

If you are interested in being part of the discussion and helping to shape the future of data on the Web, you are urged to submit a position statement in response to the call for participation preferably before the seasonal break this month, and a hard limit of Friday, 11 January 2019.