Re: Formation of RDF terms

Graham Klyne wrote:

> At 07:55 AM 1/29/01 -0500, Jonathan Borden wrote:
> >so clearly the 'concept' or term 'unsignedInt' has a URI assigned by the
XML
> >Schema spec of:  http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema#unsignedInt.
> >
> >IMHO, it is not reasonable to have RDF and (e.g.) XML Schema assign a
> >different URI to the same thing.
>
> I agree it's not reasonable, but I don't think it's invalid.

I respectfully suggest that such inconsistencies (e.g. between RDL and XML
Schema), especially when the RDF URI looks either weird or unreasonable, are
not helpful in improving acceptance of RDF among the wider web community.

>
> I think there are three difficult areas:
>
> (1) RDF-syntax is not internally consistent with these things:  in some
> cases ID values are simply concatenated with some URI;  in other cases
they
> are treated as fragment identifiers attached to a URI.

Assuming RDF-syntax desires to be internally consistent with itself and with
RDF Schema syntax, I presume that the intention of the attributes "ID" and
"rdf:ID" is to define an XML ID .... which is a fragment identifier.

I've always thought one of the beauties of a typedNode is that the rdf:type
resolves to the actual Node in the RDFS document where the Class is defined.
This of course involves a base URI + fragment identifier.

Whether we like it or not RDF is heavily dependent on RFC 2396 and the
characteristics of a URI ... with warts and all.

>
> (2) As you note, RDF-syntax practice doesn't sit comfortably with related
> XML practices.
>
> (3) As noted elsewhere, recently, RDF treatment of resources differs from
> Web treatment of resources -- an RDF resource is not necessarily a web
> resource.

Ouch. There have been many many systems for representing directed graphs
using triples and quads. Perhaps the only thing unique and interesting about
RDF is the use of URIs and all that they imply. Loose that and why are we
bothering to have this discussion?

>
> Like Dave, I happen to think it's the model that really matters, but
having
> these syntactic oddities sometimes makes it more difficult to discuss the
> model clearly.  (And I think point (3) is a model-related problem.)
>

Aside from theoretical discussions of the RDF model, if it isn't helpful in
practice, then who cares? To me the use of RDF is to discuss web
resources -- otherwise I've got a whole bunch of database systems and SQL
queries lying around -- as well as a whole bunch of theory books describing
normalization etc. If what you say is really true (I'm unconvinced that this
is not all syntactic.), then fixing this discrepancy is more important than
purity of whatever (IMHO)

-Jonathan

Received on Monday, 29 January 2001 14:37:37 UTC