Here’s something I just came across which might be interesting for bot developers and the likes, especially for the standards minded people:
OData is a (newish) standard that microsoft, SAP, IBM and the likes are working on. Basically, it provides an easy web interface for databases so that you can query them using HTTP requests. here’s a short screencast that shows how to use it in Visual studio. Dead simple
I was thinking on setting up a wordnet database this way, so I can still query it (be it less efficient) from within the light weight bots.