Re: Terminology: How to call "IRI or blank node"?

On 12/22/14, 1:57 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
> I don't think we can overload (underload?) rdfs:Resource in this way, 
> since it already has (and has had for some time) a different meaning. 
> Eric suggested calling it "nonliteral" or some variation thereon. Is 
> it possible to develop an RDF representation of "nonliteral" (or its 
> converse, non-node) that can be included in the validation vocabulary?

I think for the purpose of declaring the :valueType (range), we could 
indeed use a new term such as rdfs:NonLiteral. The implementation (e.g. 
SPARQL query) that uses this value type would substitute it with 
rdfs:Resource for execution so that the class tree can be walked up or 
down consistently. Any tool or algorithm using such :valueType would 
need to know the same interpretation. Yet it remains a problem (or bug) 
because NonLiteral is not the superclass of any other class, so doing 
the usual rdfs:subClassOf* traversal is impossible.

The situation seems to be sufficiently tricky that there is no clean 
solution and we need to pick the least bad compromise out of several bad 
options.

Holger

>
> kc
>
>
>>
>> This is how it's currently implemented in the systems that I know of
>> (and certainly the tools that I helped developed, and I went through the
>> code for form generation in many iterations). We just cannot introduce
>> another named class for "IRI or bnode" because it breaks the superclass
>> relationships of all existing ontologies. And I want to continue to be
>> able to use something like
>>
>>      ?type rdfs:subClassOf* ?valueType .
>>      ?instance rdf:type ?type .
>>
>> to find all possible values of a given value type.
>>
>> Anything else seems just not practical given that the foundations of
>> RDFS are what they are, whether we like them or not.
>>
>> Having said this, I am of course OK with avoiding the term "Resource" in
>> the prose of the specs - rdfs:Resource as above is just used as a URI
>> even if it does not fully align with the philosophically inspired
>> meaning of "Resource" in the RDF specs.
>>
>> Holger
>>
>>
>>
>

Received on Sunday, 21 December 2014 23:02:19 UTC