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Comment by nickpsecurity

3 years ago

What do you use RDF models for?

So I wrote this library

https://paulhoule.github.io/gastrodon/

which makes it very easy to visualize RDF data with Jupyter by turning SPARQL results into data frames.

Here are two essays I wrote using it

https://ontology2.com/essays/LookingForMetadataInAllTheWrong...

https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...

People often think RDF never caught on but actually there are many standards that are RDF-based such as RSS, XMP, ActivityPub and such that you can work on quite directly with RDF tools.

Beyond that I’ve been on a standards committee for ISO 20022 where we’ve figured out, after quite a few years of looking at the problem, how to use RDF and OWL as a master standard for representing messages and schemas in financial messaging. In the project that needed PyPy we were converting a standard represented in EMOF into RDF. Towards the end of last year I figured out the right way to logically model the parts of those messages and the associated schema with OWL. That is on its way of becoming one of those ISO standard documents that unfortunately costs 133 swiss franc. I also figured out that it is possible to do the same for many messages defined with XSLT and I’m expecting to get some work applying this to a major financial standard and I think there will be some source code and a public report on that.

Notably the techniques I use address quite a few problems with the way most people use RDF, most notably many RDF users don’t use the tools available to represented ordered collections, a notable example with this makes trouble is in Dublin Core for document (say book) metadata where you can’t represent the order of the authors of a paper which is something the authors usually care about a great deal. XMP adapts the Dublin Core standard enough to solve this problem, but with the techniques I use you can use RDF to do anything any document database can, though some SPARQL extensions would make it easier.