How can I represent a 5-tuple in RDF?

Question

In RDF I have seen examples like

John | Is a Friend of | James
James | Is a friend of | Jill
Jill | Likes | Snowboarding
Snowboarding | Is a | Sport 

But if something happened in a model which is described by a 5-tuple called

{Subject, Event, Beneficiary, Time, Place}

For Example:

"John met Thomas yesterday in garden"  

5-tuple

John - Subject
met - Event
Thomas - Beneficiary
yesterday - Time
in garden - Place

How can it be represented in RDF?

Answer 1

This is an example of n-ary relationships. They are typically modeled in RDF with the help of an extra node, which may be a blank node (but does not necessarily have to).

The W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has published a note on n-ary relationships in RDF.

One of many ways to express your example in RDF could look like

ex:John ex:hasMeeting 
    [ a ex:Meeting;
      ex:beneficiary ex:Thomas;
      ex:date ex:Yesterday;
      ex:place ex:Garden.
    ] .

This solution uses a blank node (abbreviated with [] in turtle syntax) and imaginary individuals and properties in the ex: namespace.