[fils]

Yes.. I work on several projects that leverage SPARQL. The article is also remiss in not mentioning the work the W3C is doing along with Neo4J to do its own alignment (https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/). Indeed, this article seems very self serving in its omissions. There is a follow up meeting planned soon for that too.

Also, much of the work in validation (SHACL, Shex) of graphs leverages SPARQL so it's not going anwhere soon. I would like to see it evolve to allow more vertex based searches without the need for extensions though.

[tasogare]

From your link "W3C's RDF uses URIs (Web addresses) for nodes and link labels in directed graphs. This has the advantage of enabling them to be dereferenced to obtain further information, making for a Web of linked data. In particular, nodes can be dereferenced to graphs on remote databases."

I think spreading those kind of lies[1] if a part of why there is a divide between the W3C (at least the RDF community) and the rest of the word. The W3C should be more transparent about RDF capabilities and realistic about the real power of the Semantic Web.

[1] this false because RDF use IRIs not URLs, and not all IRIs are dereferenceable. Moreover, even URLs used as resource id are not constrained to be dereferenceable per the spec (and when they are, you'll get a lot 404 in practice). Also, the same effect can be obtained as easily with properties (key value pair) attached on nodes of graph database.

[tannhaeuser]

I think the reasoning behind RDF using URIs/IRIs for nodes and predicates is that this gives a globally unique naming hierarchy (backed by DNS in turn), such that when combining heterogenous data there's no name clash, and at the same time allows for liberal use in closed DBs via "urn:" URLs. But yeah, if the linked article insinuates that dereferencing RDF URLs is useful or even common, that would be false IMO.

[hobofan]

Yes, thank you! That's one of my biggest gripes with the W3C stack. How am I supposed to build semantic data, if I can't access the semantics and/or they can change or disappear at any time?

That has been one of the main motivations why I've been working on a content-addressed semantic data/ontology format[0] with a modern decentrelized stack in mind.

[0] https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology

[AtlasBarfed]

Yeah, the SPARQL people need to realize that the semantic web was a massive dud in the programming and database market, and a lot of that was overreach, overpromise, and a lack of focus on "real-world" problems.

Thus, if someone is looking to unify graph QLs that are in actual use in "business" problems, SPARQL and the overall RDF aren't going to get attention. You can start with the fact that RDF basically assumes you want to globally address all your data with URIs, which will result in ridiculously verbose overhead in naming/addressing. Nevermind the fact that such things basically promise some sort of long term durability that the actual web has shown doesn't exist. After all, today's URI link to URI www.tla.com/link/to/some/data can mean the world wide wrestling foundation one day, and the world wildlife foundation the next.

In particular, Gremlin was adopted by DSE / Titan / successor to Titan which ran atop Cassandra for near-limitless scalability.

RDF and the Semantic web, while being intended for the massive WWW, seemed to not have any care for demonstrating techniques, queries, and architectures at scale.

Likewise, are Datalog and Prolog used extensively?

[p_l]

Both Prolog and SPARQL/RDF/Semantic Web are used at scale and pretty extensively. Unfortunately often behind closed doors, but there are very performant systems involved.

URIs and RDF in general don't need to use public HTTP links or anything like that, meanwhile the layered systems like OWL and RDFS provide some impressive features for implementing complex systems, especially when you actually want to use a semantic graph instead of loosely-schemed bag of nodes and vertices common in non-RDF graph databases.

[AtlasBarfed]

So sqarql rdf should stick to it's limited application space and let more generally applicable graph technologies go their own way

[p_l]

Except it's actually a superset of those simplistic models.

It's just not getting the "kool" looks and gushing reviews, mostly written by people who totally missed all the previous research. Which is a common problem all around in computing.

[fulafel]

Datalog is used fairly extensively in the Clojure world, in Datomic and a handful of other implementations.