4 ms·

It's not what you have to do, or how, it's that for the first time we have a common model for data interchange (RDF) with which you can model concepts and thing

It's not what you have to do, or how, it's that for the first time we have a common model for data interchange (RDF) with which you can model concepts and things in your domain, or more-importantly across domains, and simply merge the datasets. Try that with the relational model or JSON. Integration is the main value proposal of RDF today, nobody sane is trying to build a single global ontology of the world . You can despise the fringe academic research, but how do you explain Knowledge Graph use by FAANG (including powering Alexa and Siri) as well as a number of Fortune 500 companies? Here are the companies looking for SPARQL (RDF query language) developers: http://sparql.club http://sparql.club

saltcured 6y ago
Many of us who have been in these battles over the decades have decided that the interchange format is almost irrelevant to the real challenge which is the modeling and semantic alignment. It's a useless parlour trick to merge graphs and call them integrated, approximately as it is to put several CSV files into an archive or simply loading unrelated tables into one RDBMS. Yes, you can run a processing engine on the amalgamation, but all the work remains to do in establishing a federating model within your query or processing instructions. Over and over, we see that the real world problem is gated on human effort to negotiate about the models and to do data cleaning and transformation. And, the best results almost always require that modeling, cleaning, and transformation be done with an eye towards a specific downstream consumer or analysis. We get tired of having to steer leadership back to reality after they buy into the snake oil suggestion that integration costs can be avoided and unknown applications solved. The claim that RDF solves federation more than any other serialization format for structured data and models is about the same as fixating on JSON versus XML or YAML or Lisp s-expressions.
- namedgraph 6y ago
  Relational model, XML/JSON etc. simply do not have a generic merge operation defined the same way as RDF does. This can be proved with pen and paper. And you still haven't addressed my second point about widespread industry use. It seems that SemWeb haters/sceptics always try to avoid this, why could that be?..
  - jerf 6y ago
    "simply do not have a generic merge operation defined the same way as RDF does." Who cares? This is not a problem anyone has, which is precisely why so few formats have a solution. "widespread industry use" It's not in "widespread" use. It's in niche use, and it's been in niche use for about two decades, and shows no sign of escaping that niche. Human perception is a bit broken here. You show a list of 100 users and it looks like a tech is in "widespread use"... because you don't intuit that the market has hundreds of thousands of users, if not millions. (I'm being conservative. It's almost certainly millions.) RDF is niche. You can comfortably read an effectively-complete list of users over a coffee break. Try that trick with JSON. Also, to be honest, referring to "haters" rather proves my point about just how quickly insults get trotted out. You almost literally just said "RDF!" with no further substantive conversation exactly the way I mentioned! I know about RDF. I used it ~2005 when working on some Mozilla stuff. It had every opportunity to overtake JSON, and was never in any danger of it. In fact my current job for the last few weeks has been working on a massively cross-team data lake in the company I work for... and nobody is talking about RDF. Not me (and I do know it, actually), not any vendor that might provide useful technology, not any vendor that consumes data to provide reports on it (nobody consumes RDF in this space), nobody. Nominally a core use case for "semanticness", and it's a complete non-starter.
    - namedgraph 6y ago
      Yes RDF is in its own niche -- data interchange. And that's where merge matters, when you for example need to merge protein data with genes and drugs etc. A bunch of pharma companies are using RDF Knowledge Graphs for that purpose. The need for data interchange comes with a certain company size, and that point RDF becomes the solution because there are no real alternatives. I'm not talking about replacing JSON with RDF. Don't need data interchange -- don't use RDF. RDF is both at a different level of abstraction and solving problems of different scope.
      - wuschel 6y ago
        > merge protein data with genes and drugs Could you perhaps recommend some industry case studies or publications on that specific problem area of biopharmaceuticals?

saltcured 6y ago

Many of us who have been in these battles over the decades have decided that the interchange format is almost irrelevant to the real challenge which is the modeling and semantic alignment. It's a useless parlour trick to merge graphs and call them integrated, approximately as it is to put several CSV files into an archive or simply loading unrelated tables into one RDBMS. Yes, you can run a processing engine on the amalgamation, but all the work remains to do in establishing a federating model within your query or processing instructions. Over and over, we see that the real world problem is gated on human effort to negotiate about the models and to do data cleaning and transformation. And, the best results almost always require that modeling, cleaning, and transformation be done with an eye towards a specific downstream consumer or analysis. We get tired of having to steer leadership back to reality after they buy into the snake oil suggestion that integration costs can be avoided and unknown applications solved. The claim that RDF solves federation more than any other serialization format for structured data and models is about the same as fixating on JSON versus XML or YAML or Lisp s-expressions.

namedgraph 6y ago
Relational model, XML/JSON etc. simply do not have a generic merge operation defined the same way as RDF does. This can be proved with pen and paper. And you still haven't addressed my second point about widespread industry use. It seems that SemWeb haters/sceptics always try to avoid this, why could that be?..
- jerf 6y ago
  "simply do not have a generic merge operation defined the same way as RDF does." Who cares? This is not a problem anyone has, which is precisely why so few formats have a solution. "widespread industry use" It's not in "widespread" use. It's in niche use, and it's been in niche use for about two decades, and shows no sign of escaping that niche. Human perception is a bit broken here. You show a list of 100 users and it looks like a tech is in "widespread use"... because you don't intuit that the market has hundreds of thousands of users, if not millions. (I'm being conservative. It's almost certainly millions.) RDF is niche. You can comfortably read an effectively-complete list of users over a coffee break. Try that trick with JSON. Also, to be honest, referring to "haters" rather proves my point about just how quickly insults get trotted out. You almost literally just said "RDF!" with no further substantive conversation exactly the way I mentioned! I know about RDF. I used it ~2005 when working on some Mozilla stuff. It had every opportunity to overtake JSON, and was never in any danger of it. In fact my current job for the last few weeks has been working on a massively cross-team data lake in the company I work for... and nobody is talking about RDF. Not me (and I do know it, actually), not any vendor that might provide useful technology, not any vendor that consumes data to provide reports on it (nobody consumes RDF in this space), nobody. Nominally a core use case for "semanticness", and it's a complete non-starter.
  - namedgraph 6y ago
    Yes RDF is in its own niche -- data interchange. And that's where merge matters, when you for example need to merge protein data with genes and drugs etc. A bunch of pharma companies are using RDF Knowledge Graphs for that purpose. The need for data interchange comes with a certain company size, and that point RDF becomes the solution because there are no real alternatives. I'm not talking about replacing JSON with RDF. Don't need data interchange -- don't use RDF. RDF is both at a different level of abstraction and solving problems of different scope.
    - wuschel 6y ago
      > merge protein data with genes and drugs Could you perhaps recommend some industry case studies or publications on that specific problem area of biopharmaceuticals?