Not the commenter, but I hope to add something to the discussion. Generally, expanding on the current state of the art is paramount in academia. In this case, I

Not the commenter, but I hope to add something to the discussion. Generally, expanding on the current state of the art is paramount in academia. In this case, I guess that defaulting on closed-world and unique names is frowned upon because academic people "know" that SemWeb concepts would be "easy" to implement under such conditions (for some interpretation of "know" and "easy"). A university lab would be reluctant to invest on such a project, because it would likely result in less publications than, say, a bleeding-edge POC. Of course, practical solutions based on well-understood assumptions are exactly what a commercial operation needs, so it's no wonder that TerminusDB chose that path. They might not publish a ton of papers, but they have something that works and could be used in production.