Semantic web is still here, it's just not a dominant headline.
As an enterprise architect I've evaluated most of the major AWS and GCP offerings. We still decided to look into semantic web for many use cases, and it was still the best solution.
You use RDFox when you want a graph database but you also want reasoning. You can do logical deduction to infer new information. Just like programming languages evolved to have modules and namespace systems, semantic web allows you to namespace entities to more easily share data. It's based on descriptive logic, a subset of first order logic.
The alien features I don't see anywhere else;
* I can add logic to my graph database and have it execute as soon as I insert data into the database
* Recursive queries is way easier than SQL
* Forget materialized views and generated columns, RDFox can automatically apply descriptive logic to update facts as soon as you insert data into the database "incremental reasoning"
* The magical declarative syntax that gets reconciled that have made tools popular, like, kubernetes, terraform, graphQL, react, it's now generalized for you to use in any app at almost any scale
* You can put business rules in your database, and even if they heavily chain off other rules, it's lightening fast. You can also just type "explain" to see how data was derived
* If you have streaming pipelines that you were sending to ETL and import back, in many cases you can use the streaming inference to do this all for you without separate apps
* You can import data from Wikidata and other massive RDF based sources. This abstract wikipedia project coming up may have broad implications to the availability of RDF, especially if they're successful and it's heavily copied everywhere for other domains
Interesting. I worked in a semantic web context before and if I recall correctly, with a few million triples data stores started to run into trouble, especially with reasoning.
What kind of tasks benefit from this tool? I don't understand what you're doing even in theory "when you want a graph database but you also want reasoning".
As an enterprise architect I've evaluated most of the major AWS and GCP offerings. We still decided to look into semantic web for many use cases, and it was still the best solution.
Semantic web is many things, so I'll narrow it down to one of the most impressive offerings; RDFox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpB_tl1Vc0A
You use RDFox when you want a graph database but you also want reasoning. You can do logical deduction to infer new information. Just like programming languages evolved to have modules and namespace systems, semantic web allows you to namespace entities to more easily share data. It's based on descriptive logic, a subset of first order logic.
The alien features I don't see anywhere else;
* I can add logic to my graph database and have it execute as soon as I insert data into the database
* Recursive queries is way easier than SQL
* Forget materialized views and generated columns, RDFox can automatically apply descriptive logic to update facts as soon as you insert data into the database "incremental reasoning"
* The magical declarative syntax that gets reconciled that have made tools popular, like, kubernetes, terraform, graphQL, react, it's now generalized for you to use in any app at almost any scale
* You can put business rules in your database, and even if they heavily chain off other rules, it's lightening fast. You can also just type "explain" to see how data was derived
* If you have streaming pipelines that you were sending to ETL and import back, in many cases you can use the streaming inference to do this all for you without separate apps
* You can import data from Wikidata and other massive RDF based sources. This abstract wikipedia project coming up may have broad implications to the availability of RDF, especially if they're successful and it's heavily copied everywhere for other domains