Re: Why are RDF containers (rdf:Seq etc.) so little appreciated?

Im not sure what you  mean by 'stable identity', but the chief problem  
with containers is the fact that there is no way to 'close' them. If I  
say that FOO is a container and A, B and C are in it, there is no way  
to say that this is *all* that is in it. This makes them useless for  
encoding structures, eg OWL syntax. Collections' overcome this  
difficulty. So the collection notion is widely used to layer higher- 
level notations onto RDF, which is probably why toolkits have special  
provision for them. This does not stop you using the containers, of  
course. They are simple enough that you hardly need syntactic sugar,  
right?

Pat Hayes


On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:28 AM, Axel Rauschmayer wrote:

> In contrast to RDF collections (rdf:List), they have a stable  
> identity and don't use nested resources (=easy to remove).  
> Furthermore, standard RDFS inferencing can be used to infer  
> membership as the property rdfs:member.
>
> Yet, most RDF vocabularies that I know of use collections and  
> syntaxes such as Turtle have syntactic sugar for collections, but  
> not for containers. Why is that?
>
> Axel
>
> -- 
> Axel.Rauschmayer@ifi.lmu.de
> http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/
>
>
>
>
>

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Received on Sunday, 14 February 2010 06:48:41 UTC