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

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

#31

Post by crucialfelix »

lol768 wrote: 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?

EU data including all regulations and delegated acts and publications are searchable by sparql

https://data.europa.eu/data/sparql?locale=en#

I did struggle to find what I wanted. It's a labyrinth of metadata, and I was looking for the structured regulation text itself. In the end I stuck with good old fashioned XHTML scraping

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

#32

Post by hobofan »

lukev wrote: post #10
leipert wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just tacking it onto an existing standard is not how you get everyone to "incorporate it in a compatible, correct way".

If anything, you'll get exactly the opposite, where laymen that try to shove Turtle 1.2 (which they just know as "Turtle") files, into an incompatible Turtle 1.1 parser which claims to be able to parse "Turtle" (which was a true statement until the release of Turtle 1.2), and things explode and headaches ensue.

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

#33

Post by chrismorgan »

dgb23 wrote: post #25
chrismorgan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re seeking a technical solution to a social problem. There have been a number of attempts at very similar things; they always fail because practically no one is interested in putting in the effort required, if they even know about it.

> no one is interested in putting in the effort required, if they even know about it There is a sizeable web subculture with a focus on an accessible, sustainable, semantic, open standards etc. web with different flavors. When you browse sites, read blogs etc. that typically load fast, have a nerd feeling to them and prominently display RSS and some of the more niche open web stuff, then you might be visiting a site…

It’s the sort of feature that is fairly useless unless it gains very widespread adoption, and also often quite nebulous about how it should be used. My feeling is also that the sorts of people most likely to be willing to implement this kind of thing unprompted are likely to be producing content that can benefit from such stuff less than average.

Also, to repeat, there have been specs for this kind of thing in the past. They haven’t gone anywhere despite significant interest and investment. Granted, some were probably hampered by being unnecessarily complicated, but basically no one used them. (Examples: PICS, in in a couple of slightly different veins but conceptually similar, Schema.org’s contentRating property, and P3P.)

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

#34

Post by hobofan »

enord wrote: post #19
lol768 wrote: 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?

If you’re pying a botique consultancy fat stacks to fix your megaCo’s absolute hairball data integration, the probability of RDF approaches 1 as price goes to ∞. Trivial (as in ‘cat graphx graphy’) merging of complex data graphs is just too powerful.

Not only via botique consultancies. Almost every megaCo has some ontology team working for them. Sadly almost all of them also seem to be stuck into a perpetual conceptual phase with very little actual impact on the business.

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

#35

Post by strangattractor »

lol768 wrote: 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?

Short answer is no. Spent many years (>10) listening to people explain how semantic technologies would transform Academic Publishing and make research more useful. Failure in my opinion because - nobody valued it enough to pay to have it done correctly, academic papers have a shelf life, academic papers often contain inaccurate information. Academics publish because it is required not because they have useful info to communicate. In most cases it is the least pleasant part of research.

I have seen many more useful tools come out of LLM in the short time it has been available than the entire 10 years working with academics using RDF, Ontologies etc. RDF is too difficult to use and has inadequate tooling. LLM is only going to get better.

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

#36

Post by mxmilkiib »

zozbot234 wrote: post #14
lukev wrote: 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…

RDF is not dependent on XML as a syntax. There's a text-based syntax in common use (Turtle), as well as a separate one based on JSON (JSON-LD).

RDF primer but using Turtle (older doc):

https://www.w3.org/2007/02/turtle/primer/

Audio (etc) plugin format that uses .ttl:

https://lv2plug.in/

https://gitlab.com/lv2/lv2/-/tree/master/lv2/core.lv2

https://gitlab.com/lv2/lv2/-/tree/master/schemas.lv2

https://drobilla.net/software/sord https://drobilla.net/software/serd

drobilla has mentioned that, if there was a C JSON-LD lib, that might be enough to warrant an LV3

For more: https://github.com/lv2/lv2/wiki

P.S. not many people know that LV2 does modular synth style CV https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242

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

#37

Post by smsm42 »

lukev wrote: 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…

Turtle solves all the XML cruft problems and is very readable. RDF is completely independent from rendering format, which doesn't have to be XML, I am surprised people still associate it with XML.

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

#38

Post by smsm42 »

phpnode wrote: post #17
zozbot234 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDF is not dependent on XML as a syntax. There's a text-based syntax in common use (Turtle), as well as a separate one based on JSON (JSON-LD).

right, but they have a close association as OP says, and RDF is wrongly dismissed for similar reasons as XML (too complex, too much ceremony, too difficult, not enough value)

As somebody who worked with RDF and SPARQL for several years, none of these are actually true - RDF is very simple to work with (especially if you avoid XML stuff), can be operated on by basic string processing tools, and is conceptually pretty simple once you get into the right mindset. I think it's just suffering from bad documentation being overexposed and good examples under-exposed.

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

#39

Post by tejtm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #14
lukev wrote: 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…

RDF is not dependent on XML as a syntax. There's a text-based syntax in common use (Turtle), as well as a separate one based on JSON (JSON-LD).

As well as a nigh tabular form in "N-triples" and "N-quads"

https://www.w3.org/TR/n-triples/

https://www.w3.org/TR/n-quads/

which can end up as the easiest formats to work with sometimes.

There are tools like 'rapper' and 'serd' to convert to and from the various formats.

https://librdf.org/raptor/rapper.html

https://drobilla.net/software/serd.html

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

#40

Post by mhitza »

whartung wrote: post #20
lol768 wrote: 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?

I'm using it in a personal project. I wanted something extensible, and ad hoc, and RDF is certainly that. But it's also typed, which is nice. I can add my own types (I may do that, not sure yet). I am not well versed in the other RDF technologies. I haven't paid any attention to ontologies, or OWL or any of that stuff. I just use raw RDF, and defined my own vocabularies for everything, including structure. For exampl…

Which database do you use to store your RDF data, which supports SPARQL, and how does it perform?

> I just use raw RDF, and defined my own vocabularies for everything, including structure.

I think this is best approach. The ontology part was more of a hindrance for me way back in 2010's when I was experimenting with semantic web technologies (using dbpedia as a source of my data) and I really hard tried to avoid going of the beaten path (no matter how flaky it seemed) as a junior level developer.

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