For large applications, we would recommend RDF whenever there is significant variability of schema, but would still use an application-specific, relational style representation for those parts of the data that are regular in format. This is possible without loss of flexibility for the variable-schema part. However, this will introduce relational-style restrictions on the regular data; for example, a person could only have a single date-of-birth by design. In many cases, such restrictions are quite acceptable. Querying will still take place in SPARQL, and the representation will be transparent.

A relational table where the primary key is the RDF subject and where columns represent single-valued properties is usually called a property table. These can be defined in a manner similar to defining RDF mappings of relational tables.