The local-first paradigm improves application responsiveness by allowing data to be modified locally before synchronizing changes in the background. This ensures a seamless user experience, even with poor or no internet connectivity. Under the hood, technologies like Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and Operational Transforms (OTs) are used to merge diverging data structures. Various CRDTs exist for different data types, such as text, lists, and sets.
RDF datasets, structured as sets of triples (subject - predicate - object) or quads (which include a graph), could benefit from CRDT-based synchronization. A set-based CRDT could be used to merge RDF datasets, but it would not support collaborative editing of literals, such as strings. To enable real-time collaboration on RDF literals, a text-based CRDT would be required. However, there is currently no systematic analysis of which CRDTs are best suited for RDF synchronization, considering both functional and performance-related factors.