Design of RDF metamodel for rdf:Statement, triple, and graph controversial in semantic web community. In November-December 2007, there were discussions of the ODM metamodels for RDF and OWL
within the OWL working group of the W3C. It became clear from these discussions that key OWL
and RDF experts were surprised and not particularly happy with how ODM modeled the RDF data
model and reification vocabulary. These portions of the RDF specification describe the fundamental
data model for RDF assertions: Triple with subject, predicate and object properties; Graphs for
collecting triples as sets of assertions; and a reification vocabulary enabling assertions about triples
themselves. Pragmatic design decisions were made for the ODM metamodel which merged support
for triples and the reification vocabulary into a single class, Statement, and merged support for a
non-standard extension for RDF, named graphs, with graph.
Unfortunately, the reification vocabulary
for RDF has proved problematic and controversial, and because these aspects are key to the semantics
of RDF, some are very sensitive about how they are modeled.
To encourage better acceptance of ODM in the semantic web community the RDF metamodel should
be changed to correspond with expectations of SemWeb experts. Triples, Statements, Graphs and
Named Graphs should all be modeled with separate constructs with non-normative and non-standard
elements noted. The OWL Ontology model which uses these constructs should be modified to use the
fundamental rdf forms: triple and graph, and should do this in a way consistent with the RDF
specifications, e.g., RDF triples in a graph are considered unordered (a set).