This article explores how Grakn compares to Semantic Web Standards, focusing specifically on RDF, XML, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and SHACL. There are some key similarities between these two sets of technologies - primarily as they are both rooted in the field of symbolic AI, knowledge representation and automated reasoning. These similarities include:
- Both allow developers to represent and query complex and heterogeneous data sets
- Both give the ability to add semantics to complex sets of data
- Both enable the user to perform automated deductive reasoning over large bodies of data
However, there are core differences between these technologies, as they were designed for different types of applications. Specifically, the Semantic Web is built for the Web, with incomplete data coming from many sources, where anyone can contribute to the definition and mapping between information sources. Grakn, in contrast, wasn't built to share data over the web, but instead to work as a transactional database for closed world organizations. Because of this, comparing the two technologies sometimes feels like comparing apples to oranges.