Ora Lassila and Adrian Gschwend: RDF 1.2 Working Group Update – Episode 50

Ora Lassila and Adrian Gschwend

Even as RDF has become ubiquitous in enterprises and across the web, its awkward handling of reification — the ability to refer to other statements in a graph — has limited its wider adoption.

RDF 1.2 addresses this with the reifier: a new element that lets you attach provenance, confidence, and source directly to a relationship — including claims you're tracking but not asserting as true.

We talked about:

Ora and Adrian's extensive experience and backgrounds in the RDF community

how the need to better handle reification led to the development of RDF 1.2

the W3C's use of the term "recommendation," which many/most people would think of as a "standard"

the recent advancement of the RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax and RDF Semantics specifications to "candidate recommendation" status

the new RDF triple term - and how it permits references to RDF statements that have not been asserted

some of the details that made reification difficult in prior versions of RDF: verbosity, inability to scale, etc.

how the ability to reason on data distinguishes RDF graphs from labeled property graphs

the high quality of the RDF 1.2 W3C working group and their confidence that their work has accounted for all of the important considerations that might arise