Re: unreification

ssarkar@ayushnet.com wrote:

> Since RDF is declarative, it is kind of
> out-of-synch with the application in the background.

Could you clarify that - what does 'declarative' mean such that it could be out of sync
with a real application?

> Idea of atomicity is in transactions. One can rollback
> atomic transactions as indivisible units. It seems
> to me that 'Unreification' needs similar notion
> of indivisible collection of sentences.

Ok, i see, if a reified statement must be a 4 statement set, then all four statements must
be forgotten together along with whatever else has been asserted on that node.

> I think that each sentence to have an 'ident' is
> a nice idea for declarative syntax.  And then
> reification itself is expressed by using 'ident' of
> sentences and by expressing in a relationship
> (a triple or quadruple etc.).
> Then the problem mentioned above will not arise.

Yes, I think, if we can use an ident to uniquely identify a statement and use that ident as
an object, then a lot of our troubles will go away.  But I doubt that the powers that be
will consider sanctifying such a bold departure from M&S.  However, in passing I note that,
about half of the implementations of RDF listed at [1] have chosen to assign an ID to each
statement.

[1] http://WWW-DB.Stanford.EDU/~melnik/rdf/db.html

> A relationship over sentences should also be a
> sentence with an 'ident'.. and so on.
> This can make semantics more explicit to internal
> applications for serializations.

Yes, but how do we output this in official RDF ?

Seth Russell