Re: Subjects as Literals

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> Great - more crystallization of the problem.
>
> On 01/07/2010 02:14, "Ross Singer" <rossfsinger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I suppose my questions here would be:
>>
>> 1) What's the use case of a literal as subject statement (besides
>> being an academic exercise)?
> I would have thought the same as a use case for a literal as object.
> I want to say:
> "Semantic Web Revisited" foo:isTitleOf bar:somePaper
> Why should I be forced to say
> bar:somePaper dcterms:hasTitle "Semantic Web Revisited"
> ? Seems pretty arbitrary to me.

Actually, your example seems pretty arbitrary.  The latter,
<http://example.org/foo> dcterms:title "Semantic Web Revisited" is
conventional and convention seems pretty important for the semantic
web to work right.

Just because you feel like you should do it doesn't mean you should.
RDF/XML is a pain in the butt to parse because there a million ways to
serialize it.  Your example is doubly uncompelling since bar:somePaper
dcterms:title "Semantic Web Revisited" *works* and pretty much any
agent would be able to deal with it and understand it.

I don't really care one way or the other about this topic, but I think
this needs to move beyond some theoretical inverse relationship to
make the argument.

-Ross.

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 02:00:09 UTC