This is interesting, I always wanted to find a good use case for RDF but in the end RDBMS worked out fine.

Sports events seem a good example. What made it easier for you in your example of basketball play-by-plays with RDF?

Taking the first example https://github.com/andrewstellman/pbprdf#example-analyze-a-s... and translating it into an RDBMS approach seems rather straight forward:

  GameEvent (PersonA, EventType, PersonB, Game, Time)
  Roster (Person, Game, Team)

To get the fouls drawn you then take

  SELECT Team, COUNT(Team)
  FROM GameEvent
  JOIN Roster ON GameEvent.Game = Roster.Game AND GameEvent.PersonB = Roster.Person
  WHERE GameEvent.EventType = "foul"
  GROUP BY Roster.Team

Is it because of easier schema changes later on like introducing "secondsLeftInPeriod"? I suppose in a normalized relational scenario that could be something like:

  Period (Number, Game, StartTime, EndTime)

And doing

  .. WHERE Period.EndTime - GameEvent.Time < 5 ..