RE: Sloppy inference rules

On Tuesday, November 06, 2012 12:47 PM, Steve Harris wrote:
>
> The counter to that though is more of a human factors thing: if we
> allowed literals as subjects in triples then people would use them as
> identifiers. It's familiar from the DB world, and not obviously wrong
> to people who don't grok "Linked Data".

Linked Data is a completely different story so let's discuss that
separately.


> Sometimes it's harmless, e.g.
>    23765 a :Integer .
> 
> Other times it's not harmless:
>    23765 a :Widget .
> 
> Other times it's even hard to demonstrate that it's a bad idea:
>    "8d8b0e54-6b8f-43ab-aff9-26a7a12890a0" a :LogEntry .
> 
> It's not speculation, I've heard people complain that they can't use
> integers to identify e.g. people, and have to stick a URI prefix on the
> front.
> 
> We'd have the same issues with lexical "tags", and other things that
> are identifiers in some defined context.

The thing I really don't understand is how literals are any different than
blank nodes in this specific context. Does it really matter whether one uses
_:8d8b0e54-6b8f-43ab-aff9-26a7a12890a0 instead of just
8d8b0e54-6b8f-43ab-aff9-26a7a12890a0? The results are exactly the same: you
end up with a local identifier.

What's interests me even more is the reasoning behind the restriction put on
properties (no bnodes in predicates). I already know that it was decided
quite some time ago and that this group isn't chartered to make such
changes.


Thanks,
Markus



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2012 12:36:18 UTC