RDF is a graph data model you’ve probably either never heard of, or already dismissed. Why is that, could there be value in it, and how does it differ from the most popular graph data model out there?

RDF is a graph data model that has been around since 1997. It’s a W3C standard, and it’s used to power schema.org and Open Graph, among other things. Plus, there’s a bunch of RDF-based graph databases out there, some of which have been around for a while and can do things other databases can’t do.

RDF is also a building block of the Semantic Web, and the Semantic Web has a bad reputation. It’s impossible, it’s academic, it’s inherently flawed, people working on it don’t have a clue about real-world problems and software engineering, and it will never scale, according to its critics.

Could it be however that RDF is not entirely useless, and RDF databases are worth a look? How do they compare with Neo4j, the most popular graph database out there? Here’s a crash test of sorts.

Neo4j CEO Emil Eifrem says he has spent a lot of time in the Semantic Web world, and at a high level the idea of seeing the world as a graph and modeling it as such is one that philosophically he could not agree more with.

Read the full article on ZDNet