Re: RDF-star on YouTube

I believe the major driving force behind this effort to standardize statement annotation was the desire to bridge the gap between RDF and LPG. Property graphs are popular because they allow to structure graphs in primary relations and secondary detail. That provides a usability boost to the flexibility, but also unwieldiness, of graphs. It seems that many people prefer LPG to RDF because of that.

You may know ARCO [0] and its decision to provide "shortcut" relations that help users navigate the very involved and OWL-enabled data structures in the background. Such shortcut relations combined with shapes that define complex objects may well be the future of modelling on the Semantic Web. A sound facility to connect the shortcut with the underlying "full" data would be very welcome to enable such a modelling style.

I could give you more examples of how statement annotation, as qualification, can help usability. Souri gave compelling examples of how it helps updates. I hope that soon, with proper use cases, we can compare different modelling styles and approaches to semantics. I’m sure that some primitives will provide much better results - much more usable, much easier to navigate, much more expressive - than others. You can then decide if you still think that what we have is good enough. There are still people that think Excel is all they need ;-)

Best,
Thomas


[0] Valentina Anita Carriero, Aldo Gangemi, Maria Letizia Mancinelli, Ludovica Marinucci, Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese, Valentina Presutti, Chiara Veninata:
ArCo: The Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph. ISWC (2) 2019: 36-52

> On 24. Feb 2023, at 13:08, Franconi Enrico <franconi@inf.unibz.it> wrote:
> 
> There is a video interview to Dean Allemang about RDF-star on LinkedIn:
> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ashleighnfaith_is-rdf-just-a-shortcut-or-is-it-too-early-activity-7034501147004391424-GOg3/
> which I have commented there.
> In my long response, I’ve used similar arguments I’ve used in this mailing list.
> However, after the meeting yesterday, I believe I need to be more clear about a point which I’d like to discuss with you.
> 
> Dean says: "If you want to figure out whether you're using RDF-star or not is in the charter: are you really making a statement about a statement, or are you making a statement about something in your domain. The cost is in your domain, the time you came to know the validity of a statement is about the statement. It's actually not that hard to figure out when to use it correctly.”
> 
> So, which of the three types of use cases (semantic, syntactic, modal) would be "correct" uses of RDF-star? My intuition says that, regardless of the wording, Dean would consider "correct" RDF-star only the syntactical annotations. My understanding is that this is the case also for some of the members of the WG.
> 
> I don't fully understand why RDF-star should limit itself to consider only the annotation use case, given that *all* the cases can always be represented by explicitly introducing a resource we want to make the statement about: this resource could be an instance of an event, of a statement, or of a triple. No big deal. There is no difference among the three cases: all of them can be represented somehow directly in plain RDF, and all of them can be represented somehow with embedded triples.
> 
> —e.

Received on Friday, 24 February 2023 22:06:24 UTC