Re: The Semantic Web and N-ary Expressions

On 1/19/26 18:42, Adam Sobieski wrote:
> Hello. I am pleased to share some recent ideas about ways to express 
> n-ary predicate-calculus expressions in knowledge graphs using Turtle 
> and TriG.
> 
> https://github.com/AdamSobieski/Narratology/blob/main/Content/The%20Semantic%20Web%20and%20N-ary%20Expressions.md <https://github.com/AdamSobieski/Narratology/blob/main/Content/The%20Semantic%20Web%20and%20N-ary%20Expressions.md>

Interesting ideas!  Thanks for sharing them.  Plus I imagine you've seen 
the ways described in this 2006 W3C Working Group Note:
https://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations

However, in my view the problem is not that we don't have enough ways to 
express n-ary predicates in RDF.  The problem is that we have too *many* 
ways to do it.  Or more specifically, we do not have a *standard* way, 
such that it can be supported by syntactic sugar and tools can recognize 
it.  Without standardization, we have chaos.

This is one of the gaps that I hope will someday be addressed in a 
successor to RDF, along with taming blank nodes and proper support for 
arrays.

Thanks,
David Booth

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2026 03:20:17 UTC