Streaming [was: Re: Against the notion of reification well-formed graph (i.e., atomicity)]

> On 25. Jan 2024, at 13:27, Thomas Lörtsch <tl@rat.io> wrote:
> 
> B.t.w. "streaming" is an argument that has been brought forward a lot. Can you point me to any halfway concise treatise of the problems and practices of streaming RDF data? I’d like to understand how solving problems with reification by means of a triple term would relate to other issues. Would it be a decisive breakthrough, or more like a drop in the bucket?

Absent other hints I consulted the internets and a book [0] in a cursory half-day excursion into the literature. What I’ve come away with is that not all streaming applications work on (N-)triples. N-quads and JSON seem to be at least as much a topic of interest, maybe even more so. There clearly are different goals and interests at play, and some rather favor a more complex format to work on groups of triples at once (e.g. n-tuples [2] in JSON, named graphs, "molecules"[1], tree-like data structures in RDF/XML, etc). See also a discussion in [3]. As another example, Communica supports a whole set of RDF serializations with streaming parsers [4].

We should also not forget that a reification, to make some sense, also involves annotating statements and (at least quite often) the stating of the annotated triple itself. In almost any case there will be more than one triple in play, even if the reification itself is serialized as an atomic term.

In other words: "streaming" as an argument pro triple terms in the abstract syntax has its merits, but IMHO is not decisive. N-triples can get by without and a streaming context expecting lots of annotated statements might use a format better suited to complex information objects anyway.


Best,
Thomas



[0] Streaming Linked Data - From Vision to Practice, Tommassini et al, Springer 2023
[1] Ding L, Peng Y, da Silva PP, McGuinness DL. Tracking rdf graph provenance using rdf molecules. TR-CS-05-06. 2005 Apr 30.
[2] https://github.com/ontola/hextuples
[3] https://ontola.io/blog/rdf-serialization-formats
[4] https://www.rubensworks.net/blog/2019/03/13/streaming-rdf-parsers/

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2024 16:43:16 UTC