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The author of this post mentions the Humanities at the end of their post and TerminusDB. I work on a Humanities based project which uses the Semantic Web (https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen) and I have looked at TerminusDB a couple of times.
The main factor in my choice of technologies for my project was the ability to reason data from other data. OWL was the defining solution for my project. This is mainly because I am only one person so I needed the computer to extrapolate data that was logically implied but I would be forced to encode by hand otherwise. OWL actually allowed my project to be tractable for a single person (or a couple of people) to work on.
The author brings up several points that I have also run into myself. The Open World Assumption makes things difficult to reason about and makes understanding what is meant by a URL hard. Another problem that I have run into is that debugging OWL is a nightmare. I have no way to hold the reasoner to account so I have no way when I run a SPARQL query to be able to know if what is presented is sane. I cannot ask the reasoner "how did you come up with this inference?" and have it tell me. That means if I run a query, I must go back to the MS sources to double check that something has not gone wrong and fix the database if it has.
Another problem that the author discusses and what I call "Academic Abandonware". There are things out there but only the academic who worked on it knows how to make it work. The documentation is usually non-extant and trying to figure things out can take a lot of precious time.
I will probably have another look at TerminusDB in due course but it will need to have a reasoner as powerful as the OWL ones and an ease of use factor to entice me to shift my entire project at this point.
That's a very good point re SAT/SMT. F* (https://www.fstar-lang.org/) has done truly amazing things by making use of them, and it's great to be able to get sophisticated correctness checks while doing basically non of the work.
I'm going to have to go away and think about how one could effectively leverage this in a data setting, but I'd love to hear ideas.
We're trying to make semantic web models easier to use with a project called TreeLDR...I think usability has been one of the biggest issues of this ecosystem and OSS in general. Think programmer-friendly data structure definitions that compile to JSON-LD contexts, jsonschemas, and beyond.
https://github.com/spruceid/treeldr
Shameless plug: we're hiring if you like this kind of stuff and Rust.
http://drobilla.net/ns/ingen.html
https://github.com/moddevices/mod-factory-user-data/tree/mas...