Re: summary of 'a triple is not unique' and 'statements/reified' statements

Gabe Beged-Dov wrote:

> It would help if you would indicate a specific point of mine that you
> can't follow. I've tried to phrase my points in various ways and would
> be happy to learn what aspects of my phrasing are throwing things off.

Point well taken :)

> BTW, the use of the term "model" earlier in your message made me
> revisit the thread from last month and Sergey's posting [2]. He makes
> the point that there is only one model which is "the model" which
> contains all the statements/triples in existence. It corresponds to
> the set of Statements which is described in the formal model in the
> M&S.

Ok.  I'm finally coming around to understanding the M&S view that triples [s,p,o] are
unique;  and that in "the model" there exists only one of each of these things that I
see copied all over the semantic web.  I'm a little slow, hopefully I haven't bored
too many of you with my learning process.

> Sightings of these triples can occur in many places of which places on
> the web are of most interest to me. An RDF/XML document is a specific
> place that members of the universal Statements set can  either occur
> in and/or be referred to.

I like your term "sightings" .. I can even draw a picture of it ... thanks!

> The M&S provides a way to capture the fact
> that these occurences or references happened at a specific place on
> the web. The URI portion of the reified resource identifier provides
> this information.

Hmmm ... let me see if I understand you:

[s1, p1, o1]  The statement
[id1, s1, p1, p1] The reified statement

"id1' then would be the "URI portion of the reified resource".  This serial number
ties the occurrence of the statement to a specific sighting in the semantic web.

And serializing that in XML does not change it at all:

<description about="s1">
      <p1>o1</p1>
</description>

<description id="id1">
     <type>statement</type>
     <subject>s1</subject>
     <property>p1</property>
     <object>o1</object>
</description>

Did I get it right?

Of course were I to say something about [s1, p1, o1]  I  would hang my statement off
of the resource identified by "id1".  Were you also to say something about that same
statement you must needs make up a fresh id; else our utterances would collide and be
ambiguous.   But hopefully we have already reached a consensus that multiple
resources can reify the same statement.  Right?

> In addition, the M&S provides a way of tracing the syntactic context
> of a statement occurrence to a finer level by associating all the
> statement occurrences in a particular RDF/XML Description element to a
> Bag.

Ok, what do we use those for?

> The reified statement resource and the Description Bag are also used
> for other purposes than providing traceability and context. Since they
> are resources, they can be the objects of statements and this is the
> primary way that the M&S discusses their utility. I happen to think
> that it is a happy happenstance that they can also be used to provide
> other critical capabilities for document webs.

Ok i'll need to go back to your previous examples and study them in more detail.  I
didn't realize that you were using this as a way to make a more detailed description
of the syntactic structures.  If I can put this level of detail in my mentography,
then I'll probably be able to understand it.

Thanks for you patience ...
Seth Russell