Question on RDF and how thisweknow.org works

Question

I was reading through this question

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/273218/what-is-an-rdf-triple

and the excellent answers to it.

Roger Federer | won | wimbledon

I understand that the above sentence is a triplet. But if the sentence is

Roger Federer won wimbledon in 2009,

how do we represent it as a RDF triplet?

This site thisweknow.org allows users to query the data.gov data starting with a town/city. Can someone give an example of how the data would look like, in their db? Its quite impressive, but I have to start with a town/city, can't do it at the state level (as far as I could see). I assume they would be allowing users to query data at county/state/national level soon, can it be done without significant changes to the data structure they have now? If yes, how?

Answer 1

Roger Federer | won | tournamentX
tournamentX | year |2009
tournamentX | site | Wimbledon

Or, maybe more clearly:

tournamentX | winner | Roger Federer
tournamentX | year |2009
tournamentX | site | Wimbledon

The main trick to data-modeling in RDF, or any other node/arc-based language, is understanding where you need intermediate objects that represent combinations of things. Here you need a "tournament" node that has a year, a site and a winner. "tournamentX" is an arbitrary ID for it.