Re: Putting context in RDF serialization

I think you guys missed my point here.   Let me try some analogies:  when you
go into the hardware store to buy nails, do you find each individual nail
labeled with its size?  When a chemist studies a substance, does he name and
handle each molecule individually?  No, these things are not practical. Rather
we just label  containers.   The methods you guys are suggesting (sure they can
be made to work) all require that each individual statement is tagged as a
separate entity and labeled with its context.  I would like to humbly submit,
that people (and programmers) are just not going to do that.  Rather we need a
method of allowing packages of statements to float around, with the packages
labeled with their context, rather than each individual statement.

So you say:

> If the context can be expressed in the RDF graph-syntax (which I is the
> approach I have tried to follow) then I see no need to create extensions to
> the RDF serialization.

Your methods seems to refer to a model of the internal structure of data inside
of an implementation.  As such they work fine.  But is it really practical for
diverse systems to pass this internal information around externally amongst
each other like that?   Perhaps two systems that are already pretty much in
sync, might want to transfer a batch of statements, numbering each statement
and then also transfer the exact context of each of the statements as well.
But in the open ended environment  of the Semantic Web, I think we will want a
way to put context labels on large chunks of information.

Seth Russell

Received on Monday, 1 January 2001 18:26:55 UTC