Don't worry about the haters. You needed a paltry amount of data and you got it with the tools you had and knew.

When I was analyzing Wikipedia about 10 years ago for fun and, later, actual profit. I did the responsible thing and downloaded one of their megadumps because I needed every English page. That's what people here are concerned about, but it doesn't matter for your use case.

> Don't worry about the haters

To be fair, the original comment just made a valid observation in a casual way, he didn't criticize the approach of the OP, nor was he impolite.

But I know it's pretty common to see haters nitpicking things all around ;)

Generally Wikidata would definitely be the way to go here, though I just now tried to retrace your graph in Wikidata and it seems to be missing at least one relation (Ada of Holland has no children listed -- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16156475).

I am doubtful. I tried for a long time to use it to get data or for my taxonomic graph project (https://relatedhow.kodare.com/) and SPARCQL was just not usable at all. The biggest problem was the 60s time limit. Totally not workable for what I wanted. I also had issues with seemingly inconsistent results, but it was hard to tell.

I ended up loading the full nightly db dump and filtering it streaming from the zip instead. Faster and it actually worked.

The code to do that is at https://github.com/boxed/relatedhow

There's an alternate Wikidata query engine available here: https://qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de/wikidata (from https://github.com/ad-freiburg/QLever)

Currently it doesn't support some SPARQL features, but I've found it to generally be quite a bit faster for most queries.

Hard to use it if you don't know about it!

I only thought of it myself because you mentioned the problem with deducing which parent is the mother and which is the father, and I remember in wikidata those are separate fields.

Yup, I had the same situation some months before, even though I knew wikidata was a thing.

I know javascript and had the pages at hand.

I looked at wikidata and some pages about, but still had no clear idea how to use it and no motivation to digg into it. Because js just worked with a small custom script, to retrieve some pages and data.

earth calling ivory tower, earth calling ivory tower

superior RDF triples are like martian language to millions of humans

over

The ivory tower is working on it: https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF

RDF has to be the best and saddest example of sunk cost fallacy. Instead of redirecting their efforts to a more general graph model which has actual hype and use by developers, its cultists are double downing on their abstruse technology stack, making it always more complicated while still not addressing any of its fundamental problems.

I mean, imho RDF isn't the problem. RDF itself is very simple. As you correctly point out, the stack is overcomplicated.

> Instead of redirecting their efforts to a more general graph model which has actual hype and use by developers

neo4j is basically this. You can also load RDF into neo4j using neosemantics and query it using Cypher instead of using a conventional triplestore with SPARQL, which is nice.

Let us see your proposal of the superior model?

RDF was designed primarily for data interchange and there's nothing that beats it at that.

Nothing beats it for data exchange? You must be joking, because if it were remotely true RDF would be in wide use, which is totally not. Except a few niche domains like bioinformatics, it is not used. No killer application use it as a data format, no popular data format is based on it either. Actually I can think of a single data format based on RDF, and the only open-data I know which use it have been converted to it and was simplier to use in their original format.

And for the model: property graph. But yeah, enjoy your Stockholm syndrome with your model where reification is required to annotate an edge. Also even your nickname is an aknowledgment of RDF failure: named graphs (n-quads) were created because RDF triples aren't good enough for modeling data.

Yes, let us see how you do data interchange without global identifiers. Such as URIs, which RDF has built-in natively and property graphs do not.

You're right about bioinformatics, but lets do a quick check on http://sparql.club/ on who else is looking for RDF/SPARQL specialists. Oh look: automotive industry, finance, publishing, medical, research etc.

I just looked at the linked repo. Have they made any progress? It looks like _very_ early days.

Are you saying parsing html is easier than parsing rdf triples? Because i dont know about that.

In real life you use tools for both.

Triples are already structured, machine-readable data. HTML is not.