Installing and reading the documentation for standard triple stores, and seeing how they compare to "The Third Manifesto" for relational databases seems a reasonable beginning, connecting both practice and theory.
I think that this is somehow the next major step forward for the Arxana project. Whatever we ultimately develop, it would be sensible to make Arxana compatible with 4store and other common-place backends.
I'm interested in the theoretical issues -- and this seems like a fun and useful place to actually do some "computer science".
Note that I'm hoping that this component of the project will have a very applied component in the form of a month-long visit to KWARC to work on hooking PlanetMath up with "OMDoc and friends".
General things like FreeBase have suddenly become "more interesting" since Google is taking an interest.
Coincidentally this is also the theme of the document I started writing with Matthias (the full working title is "Widgets and Spaces: an overview with regard to data handling"). He was also hoping that the paper would be more general than just about ROLE. Maybe I'll be able to merge these two objectives into one paper; that would be convenient. Anyway, it is at least convenient to consider this paper and that one as *somewhat related*.