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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely glad to see RDF being worked on and improved. It's an extremely powerful, general data model. It gets a bad rap because if its unfortunate association with the XML syntax and the fact that many of the reference implementations were written at the peak of overdesigned OO cruft.

This type of semantically precise yet flexible data model is going to become increasingly important as a bridge between highly structured data in traditional databases, and unstructured information processing using LLMs. GPT does a surprisingly good job of converting between unstructured data and RDF, and my hope is that LLMs can provide some of the key components in building an actual semantic web, which has remained elusive for so long (for many good reasons.)

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> ...unfortunate association with the XML syntax

XML isn't great for every use-case, but it's really become the Nickelback of formats. Let's be real, it's pretty brilliant for some things, and I think RDF is a good example of where it shines.

RDF is not dependent on XML as a syntax. There's a text-based syntax in common use (Turtle), as well as a separate one based on JSON (JSON-LD).

right, but they have a close association as OP says, and RDF is wrongly dismissed for similar reasons as XML (too complex, too much ceremony, too difficult, not enough value)

As somebody who worked with RDF and SPARQL for several years, none of these are actually true - RDF is very simple to work with (especially if you avoid XML stuff), can be operated on by basic string processing tools, and is conceptually pretty simple once you get into the right mindset. I think it's just suffering from bad documentation being overexposed and good examples under-exposed.

I agree, it just has a bad reputation and there’s few obvious and well known success stories

Can you please recommend me an intro tutorial? I’m trying to query DataCommons and it’s really hard to figure out even simple queries.

Wikidata has basic tutorial here https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_tutorial

Which has a lot of wikidata specific stuff but allows to get the basics.

RDF primer but using Turtle (older doc):

https://www.w3.org/2007/02/turtle/primer/

Audio (etc) plugin format that uses .ttl:

https://lv2plug.in/

https://gitlab.com/lv2/lv2/-/tree/master/lv2/core.lv2

https://gitlab.com/lv2/lv2/-/tree/master/schemas.lv2

https://drobilla.net/software/sord https://drobilla.net/software/serd

drobilla has mentioned that, if there was a C JSON-LD lib, that might be enough to warrant an LV3

For more: https://github.com/lv2/lv2/wiki

P.S. not many people know that LV2 does modular synth style CV https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=20701&p=112242

As well as a nigh tabular form in "N-triples" and "N-quads"

https://www.w3.org/TR/n-triples/

https://www.w3.org/TR/n-quads/

which can end up as the easiest formats to work with sometimes.

There are tools like 'rapper' and 'serd' to convert to and from the various formats.

https://librdf.org/raptor/rapper.html

https://drobilla.net/software/serd.html

The problem is that they aren’t tabular and the examples they give which make them look simple are incomplete. For example, they rarely show examples that specify the language or data type. A truly tabular format is hextuples. https://github.com/ontola/hextuples

1000% agree.

My dabbling in that direction stopped at five (name-spaced) identifiers.

Effectively extending n-quads with an "edge" identifier. Mainly to eliminate blank-nodes but it handed the optional language & typing just fine and more importantly for my use case allowed for the uri to be expressed as curie (namespace) and a local_id each in their own column.

Turtle solves all the XML cruft problems and is very readable. RDF is completely independent from rendering format, which doesn't have to be XML, I am surprised people still associate it with XML.

This draft seems incomplete / hard to navigate.

Apparently one of the new features of RDF 1.2 is „Quoted Triples“ where triples can be used as Subject / Object. But unfortunately it seems at least the Turtle representation doesn’t support this yet?

Also the „what’s new in SPARQL 1.2“ is rather empty.

Feels like the linked documents are in a very early stage of a draft.

Yes, it's an early draft.

The "quoted triples" technique is otherwise known as "RDF-star" Here's an article that explains the motivations and alternatives pretty comprehensively: https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-r....

That's one of the reason for having an official 1.2 standard... so all the formats (including Turtle) will incorporate it in a compatible, correct way.

Just tacking it onto an existing standard is not how you get everyone to "incorporate it in a compatible, correct way".

If anything, you'll get exactly the opposite, where laymen that try to shove Turtle 1.2 (which they just know as "Turtle") files, into an incompatible Turtle 1.1 parser which claims to be able to parse "Turtle" (which was a true statement until the release of Turtle 1.2), and things explode and headaches ensue.

Sometimes things work out that way. But a new official version of a W3C spec is not just "tacking it on." If data or software claims to be compliant with some version of the relevant W3C spec, they almost always actually are. And while the W3C specs can be a pain in the ass, it's because they're fairly precise and cover most of the edge cases.

N3 (Notation 3), a superset of Turtle, can represent quoted triples.

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