SPARQL Railroad Diagram from Hell

While climbing the SPARQL learning curve I thought it might be a good idea to draw a railroad diagram of the syntax. Not so much.

I'll post the final version of this if I ever finish it - but right now I'm more inclined to go off on a two month tangent and implement a railroad diagram editor in Flash.

RDF Schema Diagrams

Continuing the RDF/RDFS learning process, I drew a couple of diagrams to capture the structure of the classes and the properties.

It's All About The Inferencing

Continuing my reading of the Ontology book and playing around with the Jena toolkit - I'm finally getting it. By that I mean that I'm beginning to see semantic web modeling as being about describing the inferences that can be made, rather than the structure.

The RDFS subClassOf relationship is about indicating the class membership inferences that can be made and is not a statement of class structure in the OOP sense.

So, RDFS and OWL are really just sets of fixed resources and predicates that are used in the patterns matched by a fixed set of inference rules. At least, that is my current understanding. It would really interesting if there was a standard way of introducing new inference rules.

There is SWRL (which is implemented by a number of toolkits) and the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group at the W3C - but as of now, nothing standard. :(

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This blog will be for posts relating to my upcoming semantic web activities.