Using reified statements (statements about statements)

Reified statements are very useful to attach information about a statement, e.g. to annotate who has created the statement, or to attach other metadata for n-ary relationships. RDF Schema defines a standard class rdf:Statement and corresponding properties to enable people to talk about statements. Composer has support for editing reified relationships. Whenever you want to do a statement about a statement, you can now reify it using the statement's drop down menu:


 

In the following dialog you can assign template annotations to the new rdf:Statement. In the example below, the system will automatically insert the given dc:creator and insert the current date as a value of dc:date.

 

Later, if a statement is reified, then the tool tip text of the icon's statement will show the properties of the rdf:Statement:

 

If you are working with an in-memory project, then the icons of reified statements will also be marked with a blue bubble, to indicate that more information is available as tool tip text.

It goes without saying that you can now use all the other Composer features such as SPARQL to find statements with certain characteristics, attach TODO tags to them etc.

Note that reified statements are independent resources on their own, and can exist without being instantiated with a "real" triple. TopBraid Composer does not restrict you in what you do with the reified statements, and also does not automatically synchronize reified statements with your model.