RE: Interpretation of RDF reification

 

> 
> Ah, I see. This was very clear. So X represents a stating, 
> and there can be many statings of the same statement, in the 
> sense that I could state it today, and you may have stated it 
> yesterday, giving us two statings of one statement?

Yes.

> 
> > What do you intend to do with this "marriage relationship"?  To 
> > understand your use case, I'd like to know what sort of statements 
> > you'd like to make about the relatioship.
> 
> Basically, the use case is to be able to state marriages as a 
> single triple (for convenience, say), while still retaining 
> the ability to talk about the marriage, and retaining the 
> connection between the triple and the marriage node.

I would need help from a logician like Peter or Pat on that one.

Roughly, it would seem that there is the concept of the property,
married, a relation which relates pairs of resource.  

Then there is the concept of Marriage which is a class.  For simplicity
lets say there is a subclass of marriages, conventional marriages,
Cmarriage, to allow for variations.  Cmarriages have a husband property
and a wife property, a start date property and end date property and may
have other properties.

It seems like there should be some property that relates the class
Married to the property married.  It would seem that husband and wife
properties are distinguished in relation to Married and married from
properties like startDate and endDate.

I personaly have not come across this before, but it feels like it
should be a common pattern that ontologists would be familiar with.
Maybe even a pattern that could be documented, as in the work of the OEP
task force in SWBPD.

> 
> (The *real* use case is that we are trying to map reification 
> in Topic Maps into RDF as part of the RDFTM work. Reification 
> in Topic Maps is very much the marriage, rather than a 
> statement about it, or even a stating.)

I have tried to get "my head around" topic maps a few times and relate
it to my understanding of RDF and each time, to my shame, I have failed
so I can't help at all there.

Anyway, an interesting question that brightened an otherwise dull
evening.

Brian

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 22:48:54 UTC