Re: ISSUE-94 (n-ary constucts and RDF): Problem with roundtripping when going from functional-style syntax into RDF and back

On 29 Jan 2008, at 14:12, Ivan Herman wrote:

> Well... You might think that the issue is only for complicated URIs  
> like http://a.b.c/?qqq&www (which may indeed be a pathological case  
> for a property name) but it is not. We (ie, W3C) had long  
> discussions in the past few months with IPTC[1] who, for historical  
> reasons, have a bunch of URI-s of the form http://a.b.c/123 (ie,  
> with numerals at the end of the URI string), but they would like to  
> use RDF & co for, eg, their definition of NewsML[2]. Ie, they may  
> have very good reasons to use property names of this form in an  
> ontology.
>
> Ie: I would be cautious in introducing such restriction...

I concur, though I still don't quite understand the "If we can't  
trip, thus can't roundtrip, thus we shouldn't try to roundtrip"  
argument. Is anyone advocating it that forcefully?

However, I would say that roundtripping is good and valuable and we  
should aim for it as much as is sensible when balanced against other  
considerations.

Even if you never lay eyes on some functional syntax, it is the case  
that the functional syntax/metamodel make a very nice abstract  
interface that is used in the OWL API (for example) and manifests in  
other syntaxes (see the OWLED CNL task force) and user interfaces.

(And, as I've said long ago, I wouldn't mind tightening some of the  
serialization requirements in the RDF/XML (i.e., order of axioms,  
etc.) In fact, I think that's highly desirable.)

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 14:27:08 UTC