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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

I spent 6 years working with RDF Quad Stores on a user facing piece of software for the public and academic library market. RDF was an excellent fit, data model wise, for bibliographic data and SPARQL was nice to work with.

I wish it had taken off more, everything being identified by a URI was a great concept for opening up data lakes, but alas, it wasn't to be.

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> I wish it had taken off more, everything being identified by a URI was a great concept for opening up data lakes, but alas, it wasn't to be.

The URI model kind of failed for a lot of situations - I hope content addressable RDF allows to build flexible things: https://openengiadina.net/papers/content-addressable-rdf.htm...

RDF and Sparql are very much alive, for instance see Wikidata and wikibase (with the public cloud service in closed beta atm). https://wikidata.org https://wikiba.se/

They are indeed alive, but the promise of the "web of data" has somewhat fallen by the wayside.

That's actually the original meaning of web3

Wikidata is very much about the "web of data" or Linked Data as for each real-world entity it collects lots of the identifiers that are used to refer to it on the web and elsewhere. This way, in addition to being a central island it also consists of bridges to the other islands forming the web.

Further, wikibase and Wikibase Cloud will make it easy for people to create their own web databases ("islands") that are published as Linked Data (with RDF and Sparql) in the same way as Wikidata.

What took its place in your experience?

I think neo4j is used for those purposes. I'm not quite sure yet if they implement RDF or some custom/other concept.

Neo4j is, mostly, a very different kind of graph store. A Labeled Property Graph, and not a Semantic Knowledge Graph which is the kind of graph commonly associated with RDF.

I write “mostly” because recently neo4j has a “neosemantics” project which handles RDF. It is all pretty standards compliant RDF though, nothing custom at all.

For more information this may be a good start: https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-...

RDF* extends RDF to support these property graphs.

It's not so much the data model, as the interlinkedness (for lack of a better term) that was very much posited as the way forward.

In the Bib world things like the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) so every system talking about the author Charles Dickens used the exact same identifier for him, allowing different data stores to be easily traversed and linked together, by design.

I'm in a similar space (bibliographic metadata, DOIs etc) but not too familiar with this area. Did the desire for interlinkedness go away? What in particular changed? Was an authority file seen as a replacement for a more organic RDF model?

I've not been in the space for 6 years at this point, but a lot of the "cool stuff" being done seems to have died down - partly this was some bad decisions (IMHO) taken by the committee looking to replace Marc21 (Bibframe?), running Quad Stores at scale is still pretty niche etc.

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