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Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

w3.org

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Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#3
post #2

In the nicest possible way, and from a position of ignorance of the "Semantic Web": is anyone actually doing anything with these technologies outside of academia?

Accenture just invested in Stardog, leading Knowledge Graph plaform, which is based on these W3C standards. Can't get much less "academic" than Accenture.

https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-invests-in-sta...

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#4
post #2

In the nicest possible way, and from a position of ignorance of the "Semantic Web": is anyone actually doing anything with these technologies outside of academia?

The U.S. Open Data catalog [1] has all the metadata and even some data as Linked Data, same with the European Open Data catalog [2]

[1]: https://data.gov/ [2]: https://data.europa.eu/

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#5
post #2

In the nicest possible way, and from a position of ignorance of the "Semantic Web": is anyone actually doing anything with these technologies outside of academia?

UNESCO does some stuff with it in places. (Ocean info hub, which I did some work on). The EU likes DCAT for data syndication, which is generally serialized as RDF. They’re also promoting linked data, but I don’t really see how it’s truly useful. It mainly seems like a way to turn a bulk download into 100k api requests.

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#6
I am extremely glad to see RDF being worked on and improved. It's an extremely powerful, general data model. It gets a bad rap because if its unfortunate association with the XML syntax and the fact that many of the reference implementations were written at the peak of overdesigned OO cruft.

This type of semantically precise yet flexible data model is going to become increasingly important as a bridge between highly structured data in traditional databases, and unstructured information processing using LLMs. GPT does a surprisingly good job of converting between unstructured data and RDF, and my hope is that LLMs can provide some of the key components in building an actual semantic web, which has remained elusive for so long (for many good reasons.)

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#7
post #2

In the nicest possible way, and from a position of ignorance of the "Semantic Web": is anyone actually doing anything with these technologies outside of academia?

RDF and related technologies are heavily used in healthcare and scientific fields, as well as industry.

The "semantic web" or "open linked data" concepts never really took off the way people had hoped, but there's till a ton of utility in the underlying standards so you'll tend to find it wherever you need complex, flexible schemas that with good interoperability between different entities.

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#8
post #2

In the nicest possible way, and from a position of ignorance of the "Semantic Web": is anyone actually doing anything with these technologies outside of academia?

It's pretty common in healthcare data, or at least the kind that deals with breadth of patient data. When trying to build knowledge about a disease by looking at a lot of patients, it's rare to get much useful info from a single source. Re-associating that multi-source data lends itself to a graph. If the company has been around for a little while, even if the customer-facing products don't use a graph database, at some point somebody has certainly tried it. (And once somebody has tried it, it lives forever in some part of the organization.)

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#9
post #6

I am extremely glad to see RDF being worked on and improved. It's an extremely powerful, general data model. It gets a bad rap because if its unfortunate association with the XML syntax and the fact that many of the reference implementations were written at the peak of overdesigned OO cruft. This type of semantically precise yet flexible data model is going to become increasingly important as a bridge between highly…

This draft seems incomplete / hard to navigate.

Apparently one of the new features of RDF 1.2 is „Quoted Triples“ where triples can be used as Subject / Object. But unfortunately it seems at least the Turtle representation doesn’t support this yet?

Also the „what’s new in SPARQL 1.2“ is rather empty.

Feels like the linked documents are in a very early stage of a draft.

Re: Update of the RDF and SPARQL (RDF star) families of specifications

#10
post #9
post #6

I am extremely glad to see RDF being worked on and improved. It's an extremely powerful, general data model. It gets a bad rap because if its unfortunate association with the XML syntax and the fact that many of the reference implementations were written at the peak of overdesigned OO cruft. This type of semantically precise yet flexible data model is going to become increasingly important as a bridge between highly…

This draft seems incomplete / hard to navigate. Apparently one of the new features of RDF 1.2 is „Quoted Triples“ where triples can be used as Subject / Object. But unfortunately it seems at least the Turtle representation doesn’t support this yet? Also the „what’s new in SPARQL 1.2“ is rather empty. Feels like the linked documents are in a very early stage of a draft.

Yes, it's an early draft.

The "quoted triples" technique is otherwise known as "RDF-star" Here's an article that explains the motivations and alternatives pretty comprehensively: https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-r....

That's one of the reason for having an official 1.2 standard... so all the formats (including Turtle) will incorporate it in a compatible, correct way.

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