After I posted Reification is a red herring (and you don’t need property graphs to assign data to individual relationships) last month, I had an amusingly difficult time explaining to my wife how that would generate so much Twitter activity. This month I wanted to make it clear that I’m not opposed to reification in and of itself, and I wanted to describe the fun I’ve been having playing with Olaf Hartig and Bryan Thompson’s RDF* and and SPARQL* extensions to these…

I finally had a chance to play with rdfstore-js by Antonio Garrote and it was all pretty straightforward. I already had node.js installed, so a simple npm install js installed his library. Then, I was ready to include the library in a JavaScript script that would read some RDF and query it with SPARQL. I just ran my script from the command line, but node.js fans know that they can take advantage of this library’s features in much more interesting application architectures. (Before I go on,…

Amazon recently announced Neptune as an AWS service. As its home page describes it,

While listening to the song Dear Life on the new Beck album, I wondered who played the piano on the Beatles’ Martha My Dear. A web search found the website Beatles Bible, where the Martha My Dear page showed that it was Paul.

I recently decided to copy my address book, which I have in an RDF file, to Google Contacts. The basic steps are pretty straightforward:

Last month I promised that I would dig further into the Wikidata data model, its mapping to RDF, and how we can take advantage of this with SPARQL queries. I had been trying to understand the structure of the data based on the RDF classes and properties I saw and the documentation that I could find, and some of the vocabulary discussing these issues confused me–for example, RDF is about describing resources, but I was seeing lots of references to entities, which can mean slightly different…