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I spent 6 years working with RDF Quad Stores on a user facing piece of software for the public and academic library market. RDF was an excellent fit, data model

I spent 6 years working with RDF Quad Stores on a user facing piece of software for the public and academic library market. RDF was an excellent fit, data model wise, for bibliographic data and SPARQL was nice to work with. I wish it had taken off more, everything being identified by a URI was a great concept for opening up data lakes, but alas, it wasn't to be.

tuukkah 4y ago
RDF and Sparql are very much alive, for instance see Wikidata and wikibase (with the public cloud service in closed beta atm). https://wikidata.org https://wikidata.org https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/
- philjohn 4y ago
  They are indeed alive, but the promise of the "web of data" has somewhat fallen by the wayside.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    That's actually the original meaning of web3
  - tuukkah 4y ago
    Wikidata is very much about the "web of data" or Linked Data as for each real-world entity it collects lots of the identifiers that are used to refer to it on the web and elsewhere. This way, in addition to being a central island it also consists of bridges to the other islands forming the web. Further, wikibase and Wikibase Cloud will make it easy for people to create their own web databases ("islands") that are published as Linked Data (with RDF and Sparql) in the same way as Wikidata.
afandian 4y ago
What took its place in your experience?
- WolfOliver 4y ago
  I think neo4j is used for those purposes. I'm not quite sure yet if they implement RDF or some custom/other concept.
  - rabbits77 4y ago
    Neo4j is, mostly, a very different kind of graph store. A Labeled Property Graph, and not a Semantic Knowledge Graph which is the kind of graph commonly associated with RDF. I write “mostly” because recently neo4j has a “neosemantics” project which handles RDF. It is all pretty standards compliant RDF though, nothing custom at all. For more information this may be a good start: https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-graph-difference/ https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-...
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      RDF* extends RDF to support these property graphs.
  - philjohn 4y ago
    It's not so much the data model, as the interlinkedness (for lack of a better term) that was very much posited as the way forward. In the Bib world things like the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) so every system talking about the author Charles Dickens used the exact same identifier for him, allowing different data stores to be easily traversed and linked together, by design.
    - afandian 4y ago
      I'm in a similar space (bibliographic metadata, DOIs etc) but not too familiar with this area. Did the desire for interlinkedness go away? What in particular changed? Was an authority file seen as a replacement for a more organic RDF model?
      - philjohn 4y ago
nisa 4y ago
> I wish it had taken off more, everything being identified by a URI was a great concept for opening up data lakes, but alas, it wasn't to be. The URI model kind of failed for a lot of situations - I hope content addressable RDF allows to build flexible things: https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.html https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.htm...

tuukkah 4y ago

RDF and Sparql are very much alive, for instance see Wikidata and wikibase (with the public cloud service in closed beta atm). https://wikidata.org https://wikidata.org https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/

philjohn 4y ago
They are indeed alive, but the promise of the "web of data" has somewhat fallen by the wayside.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  That's actually the original meaning of web3
- tuukkah 4y ago
  Wikidata is very much about the "web of data" or Linked Data as for each real-world entity it collects lots of the identifiers that are used to refer to it on the web and elsewhere. This way, in addition to being a central island it also consists of bridges to the other islands forming the web. Further, wikibase and Wikibase Cloud will make it easy for people to create their own web databases ("islands") that are published as Linked Data (with RDF and Sparql) in the same way as Wikidata.

afandian 4y ago

What took its place in your experience?

WolfOliver 4y ago
I think neo4j is used for those purposes. I'm not quite sure yet if they implement RDF or some custom/other concept.
- rabbits77 4y ago
  Neo4j is, mostly, a very different kind of graph store. A Labeled Property Graph, and not a Semantic Knowledge Graph which is the kind of graph commonly associated with RDF. I write “mostly” because recently neo4j has a “neosemantics” project which handles RDF. It is all pretty standards compliant RDF though, nothing custom at all. For more information this may be a good start: https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-graph-difference/ https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-...
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    RDF* extends RDF to support these property graphs.
- philjohn 4y ago
  It's not so much the data model, as the interlinkedness (for lack of a better term) that was very much posited as the way forward. In the Bib world things like the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) so every system talking about the author Charles Dickens used the exact same identifier for him, allowing different data stores to be easily traversed and linked together, by design.
  - afandian 4y ago
    I'm in a similar space (bibliographic metadata, DOIs etc) but not too familiar with this area. Did the desire for interlinkedness go away? What in particular changed? Was an authority file seen as a replacement for a more organic RDF model?
    - philjohn 4y ago

nisa 4y ago

> I wish it had taken off more, everything being identified by a URI was a great concept for opening up data lakes, but alas, it wasn't to be. The URI model kind of failed for a lot of situations - I hope content addressable RDF allows to build flexible things: https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.html https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.htm...