[philjohn]

Yes and no.

I worked for a company that went hard into "Semantic Web" tech for libraries (as in, the places with books), using an RDF Quad Store for data storage (OpenLink Virtuoso) and structuring all data as triples - which is a better fit for the Heirarchical MARC21 format than a relational database.

There are a few libraries (the software kind) out there that follow the W3 spec correctly, Redland being one of them.

[simonw]

How well did that work? Based on your experience at that company would you build a new project on the stack that they chose?

[philjohn]

It worked very well, as I mentioned, Marc21 (the interchange format for bibliographic data) is heirarchical, not relational, so there was already a better impedance match.

Then with URL's being the primary identifiers, it was trivial to take a large dataset like VIAF (Virtual International Authority File - canonical representation of all authors) and query the two together seamlessly.

Virtuoso was a pretty good Quad Store, and we got away with storing tens of billions of triples on a 4 node cluster, with very fast query times (although sticking to Sparql 1.1 and not leaning on property paths).

As to if I would choose it again ... I don't know. I'm now a decade out of the library space and haven't seen anything in my day-to-day work (backend distributed systems) that would benefit from the RDF data model.

[Zardoz84]

I'm in a similar boat. On my case, it's software for public libraries, and it's a must having data accessible as RDF. Event, we have our own public fork of Marc4j .