Am 27.03.2017 um 15:13 schrieb Kingsley Idehen:
I see Wikidata is a collection of reified RDF Statements. I don't see how this model differs from RDF's model. It just so happens (in my eyes) that Wikidata includes description of statements about things which provides rich metadata, in line with the goals of Wikidata.
It's a matter of perspective.
I agree that Wikidata can be *represented* as a collection of reified RDF Statements. That's what we do for the query service. But I do not agree that this is what Wikidata *is*.
RDF and the Wikibase model are quite different conceptually. But they are of equal power and thus formally equivalent: one can be represented using the other. Just because a Turing Machine is computationally equivalent to lambda calculus, that does not mean they are the same thing. Understanding one in terms of the other may be helpful in some context, and irrelevant in another.
There is nothing special about the relationship between Wikibase/Wikidata and RDF; Wikibase has an RDF binding, but it is not defined in terms of RDF, its specification does not rely on RDF concepts. The Wikibase model can just as well (or perhaps more easily) be understood and represented in terms of the Topic Maps model (ISO 13250).
Academically, the Wikibase model could perhaps be described as an extended model logic with reasoning rules for provenance. I think W. Stelzner explored related ideas in the 80s. Maybe one day I'll find the time to dig into this some more.