Link

The notion of provenance is essential when integrating data from different sources or on the Web. Therefore, state-of-the-art RDF repositories store subject-predicate-object-context quadruples, where the context typically denotes the provenance of a given statement.

N-Quads format extends N-Triples with context. Each triple in an N-Quads document can have an optional context value.

Link

(via: late2theparty:)

This is a VERY (very) well written introduction to RDF and it’s relevance to the NoSQL movement. The article stresses that RDF is, currently (as of April 2010), the only NoSQL solution that is standardised upon, which includes the ability to query it via an SQL-like query interface, such as SPARQL.

If you like to see a small N-Triples (an RDF export format) and SPARQL sample, see this stackoverflow post. Given [from stackoverflow]:

 

1 <- 2 -> 3
3 <- 4 -> 5

these are already subject predicate object form so just slap some URI notation on it, load it in the triple store and query at-will via SPARQL. Here it is in NT (N-Triples) format:

<http://mycompany.com#1> <http://mycompany.com#2> <http://mycompany.com#3> .
<http://mycompany.com#3> <http://mycompany.com#4> <http://mycompany.com#5> .

Now query for all nodes two hops from node 1:

SELECT ?node
WHERE
{
   
<http://mycompany.com#1> ?p1 ?o1 .
   
?o1 ?p2 ?node .
}

This would of course yield <http://mycompany.com#5>.

What the example query is doing is identifying data associated with the specified input RDF ‘node’, and then requesting an RDF node adjacent to this node within another RDF triple/axis (forgive my terminology).

A notable RDF ‘store’ mentioned in the [comments of] the post above is Bigdata store, which is hailed as scaling very well (it is free and open-source).

Java RDF access libraries include Jena and Sesame, which intern should be accessible via JVM-compatible languages such as Scala.

Link

(via techpost)

Link

…something I want to read shortly.

Text

Semantic Web Notes


  • RDF is intended to provide a simple way to make statements
    about Web resources.

  • In RDF information is simply a collection of statements.

  • A statement is a Triple (the base element of the RDF model).

  • In a triple, a resource (the subject) is linked to another resource (the object) through an arc labelled with a third resource (the predicate).

  • We may say that (subject) has a property (predicate) valued by (object).

  • A triple can be viewed as a labelled edge in a graph.

  • All the triples result in a direct graph, whose nodes and arcs are labelled (if labelled) with qualified URIs. Exception is objects (targets of the graph) can be literals.

  • In the semantic web it’s best to think in terms of graphs (not XML or Documents).

In the RDF Primer, explaining the Basic Concepts (2.1) , they start with an example of stating that someone named John Smith created a particular Web page. A statement is given as an example:

http://www.example.org/index.html has a creator whose value is John Smith

I would have said:

John Smith created the the document http://www.example.org/index.html

or

John Smith is a person who created a web page called http://www.example.org/index.html

(I noted the above example just to churn my head and ask myself some interesting questions about RDF)

URIs are not limited to identifying things that have network locations, or use other computer access mechanisms. In fact, a URI can be created to refer to anything that needs to be referred to in a statement, including
  • network-accessible things, such as an electronic document, an image, a service (e.g., “today’s weather report for Los Angeles”), or a group of other resources.
  • things that are not network-accessible, such as human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library.
  • abstract concepts that do not physically exist, such as the concept of a “creator” or the number 1.