ImperialViolet

So it's been really very quiet here for a while. Actually, it's been pretty much that way since I started at Google. A full time job takes up quite a lot of time and energy.

Mostly my outside coding efforts have been going into Hackage recently (think of it as the Haskell CPAN). If this work would interrest you, you probably already know about it.

But what prompted me to write this was yet more about the semantic web. I think TBL's Weaving the Web and some of the various articualtions are inspiring. Freebase is cool.

But I still don't know when the RDF model became the start and end of semantic work. The RDF model says that the semantic world is a list of (subject, relation, object) triples. There are a bunch of semi-standards building on top of that, but I see little questioning of that basic model.

But it just plain doesn't make sense to me. If we consider a triple to be an arc in a graph of objects, we know the starting and end points of the arc and we have the type of the arc (the relation). But I want to know over what time period that arc is valid. The triple (Adam Langley, lives-in, London) was valid for a few years but isn't now. Also I want to know who is asserting this arc, how sure are they etc. Maybe I want to say that someone has at-least some number of children.

This results a model something like [Arc] (getting back to Haskell here) where an arc is [(Attribute, Value)] (a key-value list). Without a start, end and type the arc is pretty much useless I'll admit, so those probably are required, but arcs need so much more.

Rant over.