Lately I’ve been thinking about some aspects of RDF technology that I have taken for granted as basic building blocks of dataset design but that Knowledge Graph fans who are new to RDF may not be fully aware of—especially when they compare RDF to alternative ways to build knowledge graphs. A key building block is the ability to link independently created knowledge graphs.

For several years I thought of “knowledge graphs” as the buzzphrase that had partially replaced “Linked Data”, which was the buzzphrase that had partially replaced “Semantic Web”. In a 2012 blog entry I explained how Hadoop and the new-at-the-time NoSQL databases had convinced me that even if a technology has a funny name, selling it based on the problems it solves makes more sense and ages better than selling a buzz phrase vision and then, if that goes well,…