- From: Jan Grant <cmjg@mercury.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 12:09:39 +0100 (BST)
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- cc: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>, rdf core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Brian McBride wrote: > Aaron Swartz wrote: > > > Obviously, he has studied this more than I > > have, but it seems to me that people are asking anonymous nodes > > to mean more than they really do. > > I find the circularity of that argument rather beautiful. Heh. I've used anonymous nodes for (at least) three different things: - placeholders for things that don't have a URI (eg, people) - objects that I don't particularly care to name (eg, inventing a superclass of two classes after the fact) Both of these uses are pretty "standard"; also: - acting as placeholders in a query template. And I see this last use as legitimate. My querying process is simply this: the server offers to locate bits of a graph that match a pattern; you describe that pattern to it using anonymous nodes as variables. Yes, it might be a semantic overloading, but when I looked* there wasn't any one true method for expressing queries in RDF, so I made one up. There is clearly a distinction here - one use is an existence claim of somethign without a URI; the other is using an anon node to describe something that I don't know the URI of. Logic only knows if these two things are really the same. jan * about 18 months ago -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk (Things I've found in my attic, #2: A hundredweight of pornography.)
Received on Thursday, 19 July 2001 07:10:49 UTC