Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

>  >>>>> "BP" == Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>
>   EJ> Reification?
>   >>
>   >> That's who, not why.
>
>   BP> No, you can do both with reification.
>
>Well, you can do anything with anything:-)
>
>
>   >> The Gene Ontologies evidence codes are and references are much
>   >> closer.
>   >>
>   >> Also, I am not sure of the semantics of reification.
>
>   BP> RDF reification has very little to no built in semantics. What
>   BP> it provides is a standardized syntax.
>
>Ok. I presume it provided a standardised syntax for something, at
>least implied.
>
>Does it mean, then, when a triple is reified that the triple is in
>some way associated with this other resource?

The association is done by the reification using a URI which is 
intended to identify the triple. However, there is no 'standard' way 
to associate a URI with an RDF triple. This is exactly the problem 
that named graphs were proposed as a way to solve. The other is that 
one rarely wants to assign properties like belief and provenance to a 
single triple; and saying that you believe/are responsible for a 
graph, and saying that you believe/are responsible for every triple 
in the graph, might well not be exactly equivalent. Since one can 
always treat a single triple as a very small graph when needed, the 
graph seems to be the best 'unit' to choose.

>   BP> However, all this *supports* your point. There *IS* no
>   BP> standardized way to represent this sort of information.  There
>   BP> is a more or less standard (and widely loathed) hook/technique
>   BP> upon which you could build a standard mechanism for representing
>   BP> this sort of information.
>
>
>Yeah, thats my feeling. Reification is a start for doing this, and
>might provide a underpinning.

I really would suggest the named graphs would be a better 
underpinning. Unlike reification, they do have a full semantics and a 
clear deployment model, and they follow in a long tradition of naming 
document-like semantic entities. And unlike RDF reification, they are 
not widely loathed, and they are fairly widely supported.

Pat

>
>Phil


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Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2007 16:16:19 UTC