Re: the term "named graphs"

On 28 April 2012 11:58, Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com> wrote:
> On 28/04/12 05:49, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>> My concern is with how people
>> use the term in practice, and whether that usage conflicts with the
>> formal definition.
>
> General usage is sloppy, imprecise and changes as convenient. Ambiguity in
> spoken language is normal.  We all manage.  But we are not all managers.

Yes, we have same issue with 'property', 'triple', 'statement' and
others; each might (if we're lucky) have a precise W3C RDF meaning,
but they shade into other related uses that there can't be such strict
standardised control over.

Property is probably the oddest. Sometimes in computing 'color',
'size' etc. are themselves called properties, sometimes the size of
some particular thing is counted as one of its properties, and if it
had two different colours, they're each a property. So RDF properties
are close cousin to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_(programming) but different too;
I think we gain more by neighbourhood benefits than we suffer from
sloppyness and confusion there.

"Named graph" by contrast is pretty much our phrase to do with as we
will (e.g. first page of google results are all "ours") . My guess is
that usage will get murky if we don't have a sloppier not-so-nitpicky
phrase also to throw around.

I've pretty much convinced myself that "layer" is the best metaphor
there, and that we could productively encourage talk of data 'layers'
while leaving 'named graph' as the thing that has a much more rigid
official meaning.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Saturday, 28 April 2012 10:58:04 UTC