There have been more tweets about Oracle’s recent NoSQL offering than Lucene turning 10 years old. The information content has been about the same.
The Oracle tweets, “if you can’t beat them, join them,” “we have been waiting for your,” etc., don’t appreciate a software vendor’s view of the world.
Software vendors, as opposed to software cultists, offer products customers are likely to lease or purchase. A software vendor would port vi to the iPhone 5 if there was enough customer demand.
Which in an embarrassing way explains why Oracle doesn’t support topic maps, lack of customer demand.
Topic maps do have customer demand, at least enough to keep any number of topic map service/software vendors afloat. But, those customers don’t make up enough appeal for Oracle to move into the topic map field.
The NoSQL people may have a model we can follow (perhaps even using NoSQL as backends).
They isolated use cases of interest to customers, then demonstrated impressive performance numbers on those use cases.
Question: So how do I learn what use cases are of interest to others? That could be impacted by topic maps?*
*I know what use cases are of interest to me but a comparative Semitic linguistics topic map isn’t likely to have high demand as an iPhone app, for example. Quite doable with topic maps but not commercially compelling.