Of partial reification

At 10:17 PM 11/22/00 +0000, Bill de hÓra wrote:
>I agree with this: quad refication in my mind neccessarily implies
>some kind of syncing and transaction mechanism across the quad: you
>can do it but it's a pain. With due respect to Pierre, I'm not keen
>on partial information over reified statements, however non-spec
>breaking that may be. It's a natural types question that we can go
>round and round on.

Offhand, I don't see any particular use for partial reification, but...

Under the present regime, I think the pain of disallowing partial 
reification (e.g. "syncing and transaction mechanism") is greater than the 
pain of allowing it.  Also, I don't see how one can prevent somebody from 
creating a model such as:

    [S] --rdf:Type-----> [rdf:Statement]
    [S] --rdf:Subject--> [SomeResource]

without the remaining parts of the reification quad.  I'm not claiming here 
that this is useful (though I do think we should be very wary of 
disallowing something because we can't see its utility), just that I can't 
see it does any harm -- it's simply a couple of RDF statements.

It seems to me that in pursuing solutions that avoid the perceived 
clumsiness of reification quads, we seem to end up with cures that are 
worse than the disease -- opening up new problems that just don't arise 
with the current approach.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Thursday, 23 November 2000 06:53:05 UTC