[mdhb]

Maybe worth also pointing out that a meaningful refresh of the RDF specification is getting rather close to completion.

Hopefully version 1.2 which addresses a lot of shortcomings should officially be a thing this year.

In the meantime you can take a look at some of the specification docs here https://w3c.github.io/rdf-concepts/spec/

[jiggawatts]

The sibling comment by flanked-evergl "RDF is great but it's somewhat inadvertently captured by academia." is made manifestly obvious when reading this spec.

It's overburdened by terminology, an exponential explosion of nested definitions, and abstraction to the point of unintelligibility.

It is clear that the authors have implementation(s) of the spec in mind while writing, but very carefully dance around it and refuse to be nailed down with pedestrian specifics.

I'm reminded of the Wikipedia mathematics articles that define everything in terms of other definitions, and if you navigate to those definitions you eventually end up going in circles back to the article you started out at, no wiser.

[mdhb]

For what it’s worth, I’m half way through writing a RDF library at the moment and I get what you are saying in an abstract / first impression sense but it all made sense and wasn’t a huge pain to work with in practice.

I just think that the idea of how to represent knowledge graphs is a topic that has hidden complexities in it that you need to make explicit.

My impression is that the mismatch comes from you get introduced to the idea of a triple just being a “subject, predicate and and object” and it’s incredibly simple but again, real life knowledge representation is a complicated thing and there’s a bit to unpack beyond that first impression.