Nice write up! Many people perceive RDF complex, so, there should be a reason for this.

Founder and CEO of Ontontext. Expert in a range of areas referred as semantic technology - reasoning, search, data management. I like wine, jazz, poetry

Aug 12, 2016

Graph Databases, Linked Data, RDF, and the Semantic Web Wasteland

Jonathan Eisenzopf

Nice write up! Many people perceive RDF complex, so, there should be a reason for this.

It may have something to do with the first (and historically most popular) syntax, which is RDF-XML. This example (from https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/) demonstrates it well:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:ex="http://example.org/stuff/1.0/"
         xml:base="http://example.org/here/">
  <rdf:Description rdf:ID="snack">
    <ex:prop rdf:resource="fruit/apple"/>
  </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

Looks ugly and hard to read. But there are newer and much more human-friendly ones. In Turtle syntax (https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/) your JSON-LD example looks like this:

@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix dbr: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/> . 
@prefix dbp: <http://dbpedia.org/property/> .

dbr:John_Lennon 
        dbp:name "John Lennon" ;
	dbp:birthDate  "1940-10-09"^^xsd:date ;
	dbp:spouse  dbr:Cynthia_Lennon .

Far more human readable than RDF-XML and as readable as JSON-LD.