Re: overloading of "model" Was: off the top issues list

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Graham Klyne wrote:

> P.S. am I the only person who has some difficulty with overloading of the 
> term "model" to mean
> (a) the abstract, theoretical foundation for any collection of RDF 
> statements, and also
> (b) some such collection?

usually this is evident from context; people can usually distinguish
between "the RDF Model" and "an RDF model"*. Suggesting alternative
terms** at this point will likely descend into a longwinded trawl
through wordnet.

Regarding the signing of a 'canonical' serialisation: this seems a
reasonable idea. The two clouds on the horizon I can see here are: the
assignment of "canonical" URIs to anonymous nodes may prove a sticking
point; and it's not immediately apparent (to me, anyway) how much
information (if any) should be preserved to handle namespace
issues. None, I'd say (I'm leaning towards the "namespaces are a
serialisation issue" point of view). I suppose the whole point of a
canonical serialisation is that somebody makes these decisions
(arbitrarily?) and we all like it or lump it.

jan

* maybe the capitalisation, germanic as it is, suffices? For verbal
communication we could simply shout when pronouncing "Model" :-)
** "instantiation"? - obligatory suggestion.

-- 
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
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