Simon Willison’s Weblog

RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation.

There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred for this use case?

You only have one ID for Apple eh? Companies are complex to model, do you mean Apple just as someone would talk about it? The legal structure of entities that underpins all major companies, what part of it is referred to?

I spent a long time building identifiers for universities and companies (which was taken for ROR later) and it was a nightmare to say what a university even was. What’s the name of Cambridge? It’s not “Cambridge University” or “The university of Cambridge” legally. But it also is the actual name as people use it. [It's The Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge]

The university of Paris went from something like 13 institutes to maybe one to then a bunch more. Are companies locations at their headquarters? Which headquarters?

Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem:

The correct modelling depends on the questions you want to answer.

— IanCal, on Hacker News, discussing RDF

# 6th September 2025, 6:41 am / hacker-news, metadata, rdf, sql