livesAt

livesAt is a relational property used primarily in semantic web and knowledge graph contexts to indicate a residence or address associated with a particular entity, most often a person. In the Resource Description Framework (RDF), it is represented as a predicate within a triple where the subject is the entity whose residence is being described and the object is the location entity. The property can be expressed in Turtle syntax as follows: subject livesAt object . For example: <http://example.org/JohnDoe> <http://example.org/ontology/livesAt> <http://example.org/locations/NewYork> .

The livesAt property is frequently employed in open data sets such as Wikidata, DBpedia, and other collaborative knowledge bases to link individual entries to geographic locations. It allows users to query for all instances of a particular place and retrieve the associated personal or organizational entities that reside there, or conversely, find the place of residence for a specified entity. In addition to explicit residence, livesAt may be used more broadly to denote temporary or historical addresses, depending on metadata annotations in the dataset.

In JSON‑LD and schema.org‑style vocabularies, the concept is often captured under the property homeLocation or locality, but the livesAt predicate remains a straightforward, widely compatible choice for representing residential or workplace addresses in linked data. Because of its simplicity, it is supported by many graph database platforms and is suitable for simple FHIR or healthcare use cases where patient location needs to be expressed minimally.