- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2018 22:42:37 -0500
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
- Cc: Thomas Passin <list1@tompassin.net>
On 11/21/18 6:59 PM, Thomas Passin wrote: > the problem of blank nodes is that there seems to be > no general way to assign them ids in a reproducible way. Currently, for arbitrary RDF with unrestricted blank nodes, that seems to be the case. However, if we are willing to live with some very modest restrictions on blank node usage, such that there are no blank node cycles, then it does become possible to canonicalize RDF. And that, in turn, leads to the possibility of assigning IDs in a reproducible way. For example, a blank node that is used to connect the attribute of an n-ary relation could be replaced by a Skolem IRI that is constructed (recursively) from the entities that it relates. Also, conventions could require each n-ary relation to specify a (possibly composite) key. I am not proposing this as a concrete solution, but merely trying to sketch out some of the possibilities. In general, I think an approach like this is worth exploring and could be made workable, but it still feels like a bit of a hack. It might be even better if we could instead devise a higher-level RDF language that would somehow make that whole problem disappear. David Booth
Received on Thursday, 22 November 2018 03:43:00 UTC