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by ghukill 3284 days ago
Are there queries that SPARQL can perform over a triplestore that cannot be done with SQL over normalized data? Perhaps not.

But data normalization to that end is a moving target, while a bag of subject-predicate-object statements are quite doable. This, I believe, is a uniquely powerful characteristic of linked data / graph query languages and protocols.

To that end, agree with the comment above that GraphQL is mighty exciting.
2 comments
barakm 3284 days ago
+1 Insightful. In fact, there's research toward showing the two are equivalent in possibility space of what can be represented/queried (https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889)

But yes, linked data and graphs are super powerful once the data is triplified. Suddenly you have an abstraction above the contents of your data into the 'shape' of your data.

SPARQL and RDF aren't going away, but they're the academic thing that I and others are trying to make useful. GraphQL is scratching the surface, but it's super exciting that it's scratching at all, imo.

(Disclosure: Founded CayleyGraph, supporting the open source https://github.com/cayleygraph/cayley, which I maintain and mostly wrote)

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linkmotif 3284 days ago
GraphQL, though, is a bit of a lie nomenclature-wise. As I've experienced it, it's got nothing much to do with graphs, at least not in the sense that SPARQL deals with triples that form a graph. In this department I am really interested in TinkerPop [0].

I would love, some day, to spend some more time with triple stores, RDF and semantic technologies.

[0] http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/reference/

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handojin 3284 days ago
You might really enjoy datomic (www.datomic.com). Everything is stored as entity attribute value time and you query with a dialect of datalog. You can check out www.learndatalogtoday.org to get a flavor.
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tannhaeuser 3284 days ago
Datomic, though, isn't Datalog syntax at all.

I've got nothing against Datomic, but can't help to think learndatalogtoday is outright false advertising by trying to capture "Datalog" as SEO term for a proprietary graph database which has nothing to do with Datalog/Prolog.

The point of Datalog is that it's a subset of Prolog syntax, implying that engines can be reasonably exchanged for one another. But this is only possible with real Datalog, or SPARQL for that matter.

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linkmotif 3284 days ago
Prolog and datalog ae really high on my list. Thanks for the reminder!

Datomic, though... wish there was an OSS version or CE or something.

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