Re: Feedback on RDF Graphs: Conceptual Role and Practical Use Cases

Hi Dan,

On 02/10/2025 23:05, Dan Brickley wrote:
> (...)
> One reason to want to assert bundles of triples together is that when 
> unknown URIs, URIs with unclear exact reference, or bnodes are in 
> play,  then you don’t really know what any triple is saying about the 
> real world. The idea that we build everything up from completely 
> atomic triples is a bit of a foundational myth in our commumity. In 
> practice we might want to take a handful of identification-related 
> properties into account when trying to work out what some piece of RDF 
> is claiming.
>
> Lots of perfectly fine RDF which can have clear meaning and utility, 
> looks unintelligible at the triple level.
>
> something1 someProperty something2
>
> In the rare case when something1 and something2 are widely agreed URIs 
> whose documentation and use doesn’t leave wiggleroom for understanding 
> exactly what they’re referring to, great. Otherwise we need to go 
> deeper into the graph to fogure out whether these entities have 
> homepages, phone numbers, dnaChwcksums, DOIs, GTINs or whatever. 
> Knowing which properties are functional, inverse functional, inverses 
> of other properties etc can also help narrow things down.
>
> I don’t really know what it means to assert a triple that uses bnodes 
> or non-famous URIs. Whereas asserting a medium sized graph seems 
> closer to a much more natural social act…

I don't disagree, but for me this is still a different problem than 
capturing the semantics of datasets and named graphs.

Quoting the original "Named Graph" paper by Carroll et al.:

    Issues as to how to resolve conflicts between different graphs, and
    how to determine [which graphs are accepted], are seen as pragmatic
    issues, to be dealt with by application developers, rather than
    logical issues to be dealt with by formal semantics.

best