The structure-first or the relational data model has always been used for capturing meaning from databases. It was a great, approach to managing data during the initial days of data management. However, it is time to embrace simplicity—the simplicity of using the meaning-first data modeling approach.
Humans have been constantly engaged in semantic generation and consumption—the outcome of spending the early years of life learning vocabulary and grammar to generate and consume meaning. The semantic mechanism by which it works is comprised of a subject-predicate-object construct, called triple. The three parts of the triple are the semantic building blocks of language and the semantic knowledge graph.
Through life experience, humans have assembled a working knowledge that allows them to understand the subject-predicate-object pattern as well as people and language. As computers lack life experience, they do not have the same level of understanding as humans. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has done a lot of work in creating standards. These standards can be leveraged to accomplish the job of filling in the details that would allow computers to attain the same level of understanding as humans.
This is why modeling the triple using arrows and ovals is considered a good start. Tightening the model by adding formal definitions for subjects and objects are useful because they are mathematically precise. These definitions can be used by semantic technologies to reach the same conclusions as a person with working knowledge of these terms.
Furthermore, the single triple is almost an ontology because it contains formal definitions in the form of a triple. However, this ontology, though small and lacking a few technical components, is a good start. The missing components come from the standards published by the W3C.
Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. Resource refers to anything that can be returned in a browser. More generally, RDF enables Linked Data (LD) that can operate on the public internet or privately within an organization. It enables the powerful capabilities of the meaning-first data model. It is also virtually identical to the linguistic building blocks that enabled cultural evolution namely subject, predicate, and object.
Where RDF defines the framework that defines the triple, Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) provides a data-modeling vocabulary for building RDF triples. In addition, RDFS supports constructs for declaring that resources, such as Living Thing and Person, as classes. It also helps establish subclass relationships between classes so that computers can achieve the same level of understanding as humans.
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