Containers in RDF

At 09:53 PM 11/28/00 -0800, Gabe Beged-Dov wrote:
>This seems like an interesting work-around but the spec goes to alot
>of trouble to limit the bags that occur in a document to be scoped by
>that document. The grammar disallows bags from having an "about"
>attribute .

Oooh, so it does!  I missed that.

Dan:  should this be on the issues list?  Is there any reason not to be 
able to make statements about bags that are defined elsewhere?

Looking at this, I realize the RDF M&S syntax is actually ambiguous.  Consider:

    <rdf:Bag>
       <li>foo</li>
    </rdf:Bag>

This matches syntax productions [20] and [17].

>The issue of how to handle containers is a big one that we'll probably
>revisit many times till we figure out how to handle it. I don't like
>the RDF style containers but I don't see an easy way to avoid them
>since they are so woven into the spec.

In one sense, that's true, but I think it is also possible to simply ignore 
that part of the spec and build similar structures without actually 
breaking RDF.  It's sneaky, but I don't think there's anything in RDF to 
prohibit that (which is effectively what I done with my contexts proposals).

#g


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