…

Is there anything harmful with the misnomerization of “triple”, enough for the community to try their best to start talking about “tuples”? I think there is. Linked Data is the best example of how a focus on the three-ness of triples can fool people into sub-optimal implementations. I heard this fear expressed several times during the conference, although not in those words. More than once, people expressed concern that once data had been extracted via SPARQL and gone into the Linked Data cloud, there was no way to determine where the data had come from, what its provenance was, or whether is could be trusted. He was absolutely correct- if the implementation was such that the raw triple was allowed to separate from its source. If there was a greater understanding of the un-three-ness of real rdf tuplestores, then implementers of linked data would be more careful not to obliterate the id information that could enable trust and provenance. I come away from the conference both excited by Linked Data and worried that the Linked Data promoters seemed to brush-off this concern.”