It’s definitely important, though not essential. Not every deployment uses them

You can write RDF without it. The problem is that URIs are necessarily long, so everyone wants to namespace things. Given that RDF is supposed to be universal, namespacing MUST be globally uniform. The clojure equivalent is to have fully qualified namespaces like: :com.my-company.project.my-package.my-ns/some-key But we’re not forced to do this in Clojure. That’s usually OK, because we’re not trying to mix data from many different places, whereas RDF was specifically designed to do exactly that.

Namespaces make RDF much, much easier to read and write. You end up with QNames, which look almost identical to a simple namespaced keyword. e.g. QName: foo:bar keyword: :foo/bar

But in Clojure, you don’t need foo to be defined to anything, while RDF does need it

But it does create some really useful mechanisms for translating between the 2!

Thinking about this… It might be kinda nice to have namespace aliases in a database. Right now, if I’m using aliases, then the whole thing will go into the database:

(require '[org.project.my-ns :as mine])
::mine/data

{:schema/ns 'org.project.my-ns
 :schema/alias 'mine }

It will solve some problems people have mapping keywords into datomic. It'd be nice to solve the alias into the database itself and wondering if someone on Datomic team already thought about it.

Rich is aware of RDF, and he thinks about most things. I’d be surprised if he hadn’t considered it at all

If asked, I’m reasonably confident that he would have a well-thought-out reason why it isn’t in Datomic

Sure, there is a lot of "hammock time" poured on the Datomic Design