I am very new to this field, but found these proposals on making RDF easier to use for developers to be interesting, mostly because I agree with the following statement from my limited experience with RDF/Linked data:
Using RDF is like programming in assembly language.
It is tedious, frustrating and error prone. Somehow, we
need to move up to a higher, easier, more productive level.
One bright light in our favor is that RDF already provides a
very solid foundation to build upon, based on formal logic.
Another is that graph databases – though not specifically
RDF – are now getting substantial commercial attention.
I found point 6 to be particularly interesting:
- Standardized n-ary relations (and property graphs). Since
RDF natively supports only binary relations, relations between
more than two entities must be encoded using groups of triples.
A W3C Working Group Note[9] describes some common patterns,
but no standard has been defined for them. As a result,
tools cannot reliably recognize and act on these groups of
triples as the atomic units that they are intended to represent.
This deficiency has greater significance than it may appear,
because it is subtly related to the blank node problem:
a major use of blank nodes is to encode n-ary relations.
In other words, n-ary relations are a major contributor to
the blank node problem.
Furthermore, standardized n-ary relations could also enable
direct support for property graphs[10], which have emerged as
a popular and convenient way to represent graph data, led by
Neo4J.[11] Property graphs add the ability to attach attributes
to relationships, which can be viewed as a special case of
n-ary relations. Olaf Hartig and Bryan Thompson have proposed
conventions for adding property graph support to RDF.
Expanding on this from neo4j:
Debunking some RDF-vs-Property Graph Alternative Facts — Dr. Jesús Barrasa, Neo4j
(Slides)
Perhaps there are some nuggets in here that could help make the Safe Network’s RDF linked data and triple storage and query system as easy to use as possible. @happybeing has also linked to similar sentiments here.
