RDF Needs Annotations

While the current mechanism of reification in RDF is without semantics and widely considered inappropriate and cumbersome, some form of reification – speaking about triples themselves – is needed in RDF for many reasonable applications: in particular, reification allows for enhancing triples with annotations relating to provenance, spatio-temporal validity, degrees of trust, fuzzy values and/or other contextual information. In this position paper, we argue that – besides resolving the issue of how to syntactically represent reification in the future (i.e., whether to stick with the current reification mechanism or standardise a different mechanism such as Named Graphs) – it is time to agree on certain core annotations that are widely needed. We summarise existing work and provide a possible direction towards handling reification by means of a general annotation framework that can be instantiated for those major use cases we currently see arising.