Re: Blank Nodes Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

On 11/25/2018 8:28 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> :foo
>    :address [
>        :number  123;
>        :street  “Acacia Avenue” ]
> 
> I understand that this is saying that :foo has something that is related to it by the :address property.
> But it is a bit weird that it then goes on to be very specific about that something.


The whole thing could also be expressed as

:foo :address _:x1.
_:x1 :number 123.
_:x1 :street "Acacia Avenue".

This aligns closely with what you said:

 > I see it is also saying there exists something that has two properties:
 >   :number  123;
 >           :street  “Acacia Avenue”

I don't see the weirdness there...  You could in the future add 
something like this for clarification if you happen to learn that there 
is a type ex:streetAddress (or an inference system could possibly add it) -

_:x1 rdf:type ex:streetAddress.

To me, none of this seems weird.  There wouldn't be much point to adding 
an identifier to the address unless someone might want to refer to it 
later.  OTOH, since you don't know how someone else might want to use it 
later, it seems like it would be good for there to be an unambiguous way 
to create an identifier to support such other uses.  To me, I tend to 
think it would be useful to know that these identifiers had been made up 
for formal purposes, so maybe there could be an reserved protocol scheme 
for them.  Maybe like "rdf-blank:asdn-2354-8756".

> Because of the way this is then interpreted (I think) for the two bnodes to have the same bnode identifier,
> it is saying that there exists something that has all those properties.

Received on Sunday, 25 November 2018 14:31:18 UTC