From Semantic Nanopublications to Knowledge Graphs: What 15 Years of Machine-Readable Data Taught Us About RAG Grounding
Long before transformer models transformed language generation, distributed systems engineers wrestled with a fundamental challenge: how do you convert sprawling human literature into machine-verifiable, provenance-tracked facts? In 2011, the concept of semantic nanopublications emerged in technical literature (including our work in Nature Genetics, doi:10.1038/ng0411-281) as a solution for scientific data publishing. The core thesis was simple: a machine-actionable fact cannot be a naked string. It must encapsulate three connected components: an Assertion, its Provenance, and its Publication Metadata. ...