Statements

Instances of this class model semantic triples (subject, predicate, object) and corresponding qualifiers. Every edge in the knowledge graph corresponds to a statement instance.

Note

Note: For technical reasons for every Statement instance there exits a dual Statement instance. For most situations this does not matter, though.

The whole knowledge graph is a collection of Entities (Items, Relation, Literals) and Statements. Roughly speaking, the collection of Entities defines what exists (in the respective universe of discourse) while the collection of Statements defines how these things are related. Because flat subject-predicate-object triples have very limited expressivity it is possible to “make statements about statements”, i.e. use a Statement instance as subject another triple. This Wikidata -inspired mechanism is called qualifiers (see next page).