> Has this been done before? Depends what you mean by "this"! RDF [1] and most of the technology surrounding it and the "Semantic Web" are based on (subject, p

> Has this been done before? Depends what you mean by "this"! RDF [1] and most of the technology surrounding it and the "Semantic Web" are based on (subject, predicate, object) triples almost exactly like this, where each element is often a URI, and objects are often strings just like they are here. It even has taken this idea to the next level where the statements expressed by such a triple can themselves be given an "anonymous" ID, which can then be used as a subject or object – meaning you can make meta statements about the statement itself, all while still using this simple system of triples. There are even entire languages built around querying graphs of such triples: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/ https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/ DBpedia [1] is one such project that attempts to encode data from Wikipedia in triples like this; their About page says that the 2014 version of the database had 3 billion triples, so that number is probably much higher now. Here's a preview if you want to see what these triples look like: • Homepages of things: http://downloads.dbpedia.org/preview.php?file=2015-10_sl_core-i18n_sl_en_sl_homepages_en.ttl.bz2 http://downloads.dbpedia.org/preview.php?file=2015-10_sl_cor... • Genders of things: http://downloads.dbpedia.org/preview.php?file=2015-10_sl_core-i18n_sl_en_sl_genders_en.ttl.bz2 http://downloads.dbpedia.org/preview.php?file=2015-10_sl_cor... etc. You'll notice that RDF predicates are all namespaced by URIs; that way you can unambiguously know in what sense "homepage" and "gender" are used (consider more ambiguous properties like "length"). That means there can be other uses of "homepage", "gender", "length" etc. that mean different things, and those will be namespaced by a different URI. Anyway, this Outpan project is obviously a more loose and freeform version of that – but only slightly; RDF is not very strict at all, it's just that people have thought a lot about how to successfully model the entire world's information, and so real-world RDF ontologies end up looking somewhat complicated. I'm not sure if a freeform version like this has been widely attempted before. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework [2] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ http://wiki.dbpedia.org/