Nested Triples wen

Why Can’t We Add Claims to Lists yet?

When creating lists on Intuition, you quickly run into a limitation:

you can only add Atoms, not claims (Triples).

But why?


Right now, lists are just collections of claims:

  • Tatooine → is in → Star Wars Planets

Which means every list entry looks like:

[Atom] → [has tag] → [List Atom]


But what if you want to list something like:

  • “Privacy is more important than safety”

  • “Expelliarmus is better than Avada Kedavra”

These aren’t Atoms. They’re claims.

And there’s no way to add them.


The reason seems structural:

Triples aren’t treated as first-class entities.
You can’t do:

[Claim] → belongs to → [List]

because claims can’t act as subjects.


And this is essentially the idea of nested triples:

being able to take a statement like
(A → relation → B)
and use it as part of another statement.

Right now, that layer doesn’t exist.


But this raises a bigger question:

should it?

Because without nested triples, lists can only group things, not ideas.

No:

  • lists of opinions

  • lists of arguments

  • lists of beliefs


So the limitation isn’t just about lists.

It’s that statements themselves aren’t referenceable.

And until they are, an entire layer of knowledge stays unstructured.


What happens when we want to organize not just what exists,
but what is being claimed?

That’s where things get interesting.

2 Likes
  1. Nested Triples are supported! Pinging some folks to point you in the proper direction to get up and running with them!
  2. A bit of a side tangent, but Triples like “Privacy is more important than safety” or “Expelliarmus is better than Avada Kedavra” are not very good Semantic Engineering, so I would recommend restructuring Triples that looks like this. I know the most recent epoch(s) had winning featured claims that were structured like this, since the community curated them - and they do make sense semantically - but it’s a suboptimal pattern to follow for data in the KG, generally. We need to do a better job as a community in surfacing and setting best practices for Semantic Engineering, now that people are getting to this level of sophistication!
1 Like

Alright that’s great news!

Okay so can you recommend the optimal struture and point to some docs/papers/articles for the best semantic engineering practices for the KG. We’d also need to educate and sensitize the community to the best practices!

Hey @pixie you are able to create claims/lists that container other claims.

It’s a little tucked away, but if you click the “Create” button, then use the filter drop-downs, you can select “Claim” which will only show existing Claims (i.e. triples).

Do you think we should make this more explicit?

1 Like

Omg is the new cuz I am just noticing haha!
Just tried it out and it worked, thanks!

Yeah I agree it’s tucked away, could be a bit more prominent, or maybe I just thought it didn’t exist and never checked!