3 ms·

You're right to emancipate from the grab that SemWeb has had on the field for so long and turn to Prolog/Datalog and practical approaches IMO. Open world semant

You're right to emancipate from the grab that SemWeb has had on the field for so long and turn to Prolog/Datalog and practical approaches IMO. Open world semantics and sophisticated theories may have been a vision for the semantic web of heterogenous data, but in reality RDF and co are only used in certain closed-world niches IME. Pascal Hitzler is one of the more prolific authors (especially with the EU-funded identification of description logic fragments of OWL2 which are some of the better results in the field IMO), but beginning this whole discussion with W3C's RDF is wrong IMO when description logic as more or less variable-free fragments of first-order logic with desirable complexities was a thing in 1991 or earlier already. Nit: careful with datomic. It's clearly not Datalog, but an ad-hoc syntax whereas Datalog is a proper syntactic subset of Prolog. And while I don't like SPARQL, it still gives quite good compat for querying large graph databases.

j-pb 6y ago
NitNit: I think the term "Datalog" the prolog subset, has been pretty much replaced with "Datalog" the recursive consjunctive query fragment with recursion (and sometimes stratified negation) term. Most papers and textbooks I read these days use it as a complexity class for queries and not as a concrete syntax.
- LukeEF 6y ago
  This is the sense in which I was using Datalog - and how others like Datomic, Grakn and Crux use it (there is a growing movement of databases with a 'Datalog' query language) - althou in our case, we can also use in the former sense as TerminusDB is implemented in prolog.
JPKab 6y ago
I met Pascal Hitzler on a few occasions, not long after he ended up relocating from Germany to Ohio to work at Wright State. He was a rare bright spot in always trying to bridge the gap between theory and application in the SemWeb community. He was kind enough to meet up with me and a colleague at a coffee shop in Dayton to discuss our project, all pro-bono. A real good dude.

j-pb 6y ago

NitNit: I think the term "Datalog" the prolog subset, has been pretty much replaced with "Datalog" the recursive consjunctive query fragment with recursion (and sometimes stratified negation) term. Most papers and textbooks I read these days use it as a complexity class for queries and not as a concrete syntax.

LukeEF 6y ago
This is the sense in which I was using Datalog - and how others like Datomic, Grakn and Crux use it (there is a growing movement of databases with a 'Datalog' query language) - althou in our case, we can also use in the former sense as TerminusDB is implemented in prolog.

JPKab 6y ago

I met Pascal Hitzler on a few occasions, not long after he ended up relocating from Germany to Ohio to work at Wright State. He was a rare bright spot in always trying to bridge the gap between theory and application in the SemWeb community. He was kind enough to meet up with me and a colleague at a coffee shop in Dayton to discuss our project, all pro-bono. A real good dude.