How can I introduce a 5-tuple in RDF?

Question

In RDF, I saw examples like

John | Is a Friend of | James James | Is a friend of | Jill Jill | Likes | Snowboarding Snowboarding | Is a | Sport 

But if something happened in the model, which is described by a 5-tuple called

 {Subject, Event, Beneficiary, Time, Place} 

Example:

 "John met Thomas yesterday in garden" 

5-tuple

 John - Subject met - Event Thomas - Beneficiary yesterday - Time in garden - Place 

How can it be represented in RDF?

Answer 1

This is an example of an n-ary relationship . They are typically modeled in RDF using an additional node, which may be an empty node (but not necessarily).

The W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Work has a published note on n-ary relationships in RDF .

One of many ways to express your example in RDF might look like

 ex:John ex:hasMeeting [ a ex:Meeting; ex:beneficiary ex:Thomas; ex:date ex:Yesterday; ex:place ex:Garden. ] . 

This solution uses an empty node (abbreviated [] in turtle syntax) and imaginary identities and properties in the ex: namespace.