RDF Investigations

Hi folks,

A couple of years ago I got the idea of finding alternatives to the
official definition of RDF, especially the semantics.  I've always
found the official docs less than crystal clear, and have always
harbored the suspicion that the model-theoretic definition of RDF
semantics offered in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/ was unnecessary, or
at least unnecessarily complicated.  Needless to say that is my own
personal aesthetic judgment, but it did motivate my little project.

I guess the past two years have not been completely wasted on me; what
was a somewhat vague intuition back then seems to have matured into a
pretty clear idea of how RDF ought to be conceptualized and formally
defined.  Clear to me, anyway; whether it is to others, and whether it
is correct or not is a whole 'nother matter.

Since pursuing this idea will involve a lot of writing I won't pursue
it here; instead I've described the the basic ideas in a blog post at
http://blog.mobileink.com/.  The allusion to Wittgenstein, that great
philosophical therapist, is entirely intentional.  You (or at least I)
find out a lot of things when you analyze a concept very closely; if
my analysis is not mistaken, there are some fundamental problems in
the land of RDF.  For example, it is possible to show, among other
things, that the concept of a graph is not essential to RDF; nor is
the treatment of the Property node of a triple as an arrow or relation
necessary; nor is the concrete semantics defined in the RDF Semantics
document the only or even the best "theory" of RDF.  (Maybe this is
all obvious to the cognoscenti, but insistence that RDF just is a
graph is very common.) On the positive side, thinking about RDF as a
mathematical domain (or domains), independent of RDF as a language,
leads to a pretty substantial improvement in clarity; and since it
requires a certain amount of creativity it's just fun.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I will need some help,
especially from real mathematicians and logicians.  A category
theorist, for example.  Not only to check my reasoning; my hope is
that others interested in pursuing this line of thought might come up
with yet other fresh ideas.

Plus, I've had a lot of fun thinking along those lines, and since a
lot of people on this list spend a lot of time thinking about RDF
(among other things), I thought they might find it interesting and fun
as well.  The plan is to post a series of blog articles fleshing out
the ideas in coming months, so if anybody would like to help or
collaborate please let me know.

Cheers,

Gregg Reynolds

Received on Sunday, 23 June 2013 16:49:44 UTC