This is very cool! What is the SQL engine under?

Thanks! It's using Datafusion as the query engine: https://github.com/apache/arrow-datafusion

> You couldn’t just Google how to build a database

> Fortunately, I didn’t know any experts and so I did it anyway

He obviously lives by a certain ethos of self-reliance so not sure he would have talked to experts if could.

But makes me wonder: given it so easy now to find the experts compared to 2000, to google what they think - it is easier to get discouraged?

The question is: If he had asked experts early on, would he have ended up less self reliant? And would we have gotten an SQLite as good as it is now or would he have been told "oh that's too complex" and be discouraged by experts? :)

And yet it is possible to fix given an agreed-upon validator on being alive /being trustable (the french goverment), assuming she still lives by then.

In our decentralized future[1] this kind of error will be impossible to rectify, as long as someone believes you are dead or just untrustable.

1. Companies like https://www.identiq.com/ (they are far from only ones)

Schemes like that only work if you participate. Even in America we have people that refuse to participate in the birth certificate and social security scheme for better or for (mostly) worse.

Incidentally, it looks like Semantic Web is not dead but actually accelerating growth -thanks to current SEO practices abd Google showing semantic data within search results [1]

As for complicated , yeah, but business web platforms like Wix support those as part of SEO capabilities [2]. So you would you need the smb web dev platforms to support NUM to make it a reality?

1. http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/#toc3

2. https://support.wix.com/en/article/adding-structured-data-to...

> it looks like Semantic Web is not dead but actually accelerating growth

IMO the general-purpose semantic web (not that used in academia) is only useful for huge companies like Google, with the engineering capacity to understand all the different types of data that might be found.

At times, it seems it's almost complex by design to keep smaller developers from being able to consume the data and build anything useful on top of it.

> So you would you need the smb web dev platforms to support NUM to make it a reality?

That would be cool but it's not required for NUM to be broadly adopted. We provide a tool, NUM Server [0], where you can publish and manage data using simple online forms after proving authority for your domain name.

The best angle for us on this point, is actually through domain name registrars that offer add-ons to domain name registration and through agencies (web design, social, etc).

0. https://app.numserver.com/tools/editor/add

> the general-purpose semantic web is only useful for huge companies like Google, with the engineering capacity to understand all the different types of data that might be found.

But easier than parsing the general web

This a very interesting assumption to tackle - how non-google players can leverage all those new semantic jsonlds? I'm pretty sure the barrier is lower to build a product aggregator or a product comparison site based on scraping the web. What else?