Proposal: #rdfms-identity-anon-resources

All,

With reference to my previous message:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Jul/0024.html

there's not been an overwhelming response concerning the key question 
raised, but some muted agreement with the suggestion that this is really a 
syntactic issue.

By way of a reminder, the key question was:

   1. Are anonymous resources allowed in the abstract graph syntax?

In order to either (a) declare a quick victory, or (b) flush out the 
objections, I'm going to assume the answer is "no" and make a proposal for 
resolution of this issue.


PROPOSAL:

Anonymous resources may appear in the XML serialization of an RDF graph, 
but they have no distinguished representation in the abstract syntax of RDF.

It is the responsibility of an RDF/XML parser to assign a unique URI for 
any resource that is not explicitly named.  The essential property of a 
unique URI is that the same URI is not used as the explicitly given or 
automatically generated identifier of any other element in any graph that 
contains the uniquely generated URI.

No specific mechanism for generating such URIs is mandated, but the 
following options might be considered:
(a) relative URI forms in the generated graph.
(b) uuid URIs.
(c) URIs containing identification of the RDF parser.
(d) URIs containing large random values.


#g

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2001 13:29:11 UTC