[moxious]

> Can you name a property graph use case that cannot be solved with RDFS and SPARQL?

No - that's not the point. Of course you can do it with RDFS + SPARQL. For that matter you could do it with redis. Fully beside the point.

What's important is what the more fluent and easy way to do things is. People vote with their feet, and property graphs are demonstrably easier to work with for most use cases.

[namedgraph]

“Easier” is completely subjective, no way you can demonstrate that.

RDF solves a much larger problem than just graph data model and query. It addresses data interchange on the web scale, using URIs, zero-cost merge, Linked Data etc.

[moxious]

> “Easier” is completely subjective, no way you can demonstrate that.

I agree it's subjective. While there's no exact measurement for this sort of thing, the proxy measure people usually use is adoption; and if you look into for example Cypher vs. SPARQL adoption, Neo4j vs. RDF store adoption, people are basically voting with their feet.

From my personal experiences developing software with both, I've found property graphs much simpler and a better map for how people think of data.

It's true that RDF tries to solve data interchange on the web scale. That's what it was designed for. But the original design vision, in my view, hasn't come to fruition. There are bits and pieces that have been adopted to great effect (things like RDF microformats for tagging HTML docs) but nothing like what the vision was.

[westurner]

What was the vision?

The RDFJS "Comparison of RDFJS libraries" wiki page lists a number of implementations; though none for React or AngularJS yet, unfortunately. https://www.w3.org/community/rdfjs/wiki/Comparison_of_RDFJS_...

There's extra work to build general purpose frameworks for Linked Data. It may have been hard for any firm with limited resources to justify doing it the harder way (for collective returns)

Dokieli (SOLID (LDP,), WebID, W3C Web Annotations,) is a pretty cool - if deceptively simple-looking - showcase of what's possible with Linked Data; it just needs some CSS and a revenue model to pay for moderation. https://dokie.li/

[westurner]

> property graphs are demonstrably easier to work with for most use cases.

How do you see property graphs as distinct from RDF?

People build terrible apps without schema or validation and leave others to clean that up.

[moxious]

> How do you see property graphs as distinct from RDF?

This is the full answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/30167732/2920686

[westurner]

I added an answer in context to the comments on the answer you've linked but didn't add a link from the comments to the answer. Here's that answer:

> (in reply to the comments on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/30167732 )

> When an owl:inverseOf production rule is defined, the inverse property triple is inferred by the reasoner either when adding or updating the store, or when selecting from the store. This is a "materialized relation"

> Schema.org - an RDFS vocabulary - defines, for example, https://schema.org/isPartOf as the inverse property of hasPart. If both are specified, it's not necessary to run another graph pattern query to traverse a directed relation in the other direction. (:book1 schema:hasPart ?o), (?o schema:isPartOf :book1), (?s schema:hasPart :chapter2)

> It's certainly possible to use RDFS and OWL to describe schema for and within neo4j property graphs; but there's no reasoner to e.g. infer inverse properties or do schema validation.

> Is there any RDF graph that neo4j cannot store? RDF has datatypes and languages for objects: you'd need to reify properties where datatypes and/or languages are specified (and you'd be re-implementing well-defined semantics)

> Can every neo4j graph be represented with RDF? Yes.

> RDF is a representation for graphs for which there are very many store implementations that are optimized for various use cases like insert and query performance.

> Comparing neo4j to a particular triplestore (with reasoning support) might be a more useful comparison given that all neo4j graphs can be expressed as RDF.