Re: RDF Graphs

Hi all

Interesting discussion, which reminds me of the good old chinese story "A
white horse is not a horse".

To answer Simon's remark, people need metaphors, and visual ones can help
some people, if not everybody. I don't care either about visualizations of
RDF graphs, they don't appeal to me, but if they help some people to grasp
the general RDF idea and somehow buy it (in all senses of "buy"), then just
take it as a selling argument, no more no less. Think about Google
Knowledge Graph, which is certainly no more a graph stricto sensu than RDF
graph are. But it sells, people grasp quite easily the notion of a mesh of
things connected by meaningful links, and it looks like serious knowledge :)
Once you've sold the broad picture and drill down into the (devilish)
details, the terms are not that much important. Think about "ontology", for
example. It is the other way round, people are easily scared by the word
rather than the thing, and I often tend to call it otherwise depending on
my interlocutors and the context (model, whatever).


2014-10-28 3:50 GMT+01:00 Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com>:

> I've never seen the real advantage of the graph metaphor for RDF; is it
> any easier to understand than viewing triples as a set of ground binary
> formula, or as a conjunction of binary formula embedded in a mess of
> existential qualifiers (because blank nodes)?
>
> Simon
>



-- 

*Bernard Vatant*
Vocabularies & Data Engineering
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