TM + RDF was Re: Again: Anonymous Resources and literals

From Steve and Michel's excellent presentation at the RDFIG F2F, I think
that perhaps the most fruitful integration between topic maps and RDF is not
in the area of syntaxes (do we really need yet another syntax :-) but rather
for this _exact_ type of processing, that is how to 'merge' URIs
representing anonymous resources when we have discovered that we are really
talking about the same thing.

What would be really useful (to me) would be an integration of the topic map
processing model into RDF and this would perhaps be best accomplished at or
aside the level of DAML+x

-Jonthan


> Jan,
>
> At 10:53 AM 3/12/01 +0000, Jan Grant wrote:
>
> >Have a look at http://tribble.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~cmjg/rdf/discuss -
>
> I started my message to disagree with this bit:
>
> >There are obviously situations where we may need to have reference to the
> >same resource multiple times (perhaps someone who is both an author and
> >editor of a
> >book appears twice in the capacity of 'contributor'). However, looking
> >more closely at this example, it is evident to me that a set would more
> >than suffice. Why?
> >Well, are we solely interested in whether Joe Bloggs is a 'contributor'?
> >If so, he either is, or he isn't. Set membership works like that. Are we
> >interested, instead, in
> >the number of times or the different roles that Joe Bloggs contributed?
In
> >which case, surely the collection we're talking about is a set of events
> >or roles which carry
> >the extra information required to distinguish 'Joe Bloggs as author' from
> >'Joe Bloggs as editor'. That's why I think bag should have been set.
>
> ...but then realized that it might shed some useful light on the way
> literals may be handled (something that you may have been alluding to
later
> when you mention "virtual nodes"?), and that I would then be fully in
> agreement with the above.
>
> My counter-example was to be the book with three authors named "Smith",
> "Smith" and "Jones".  To represent the raw information from which one
could
> draw up a list of the book's authors, I think that a bag, not a set would
> be required.  But note that this argument only makes sense if the authors
> are represented by their literal names, which (in RDF terms) is a rather
> half-hearted approach to capturing the knowledge.  If the authors were
> represented by resources, then everything you say above would apply.
>
> This led me to thinking that a literal should maybe stand for an anonymous
> resource which happens to have a property:
>
>    [ >-rdf:value-> data:,Smith ]
>
> By this approach, the two "Smith" literals would stand for different
resources.
>
> ...
>
> On a related note, I wonder if our discussions are not in danger of
> conflating two distinct issues:
>
>    anonymity of resources (which I take to mean that we don't *know* their
URI)
> and
>    existential quantification of a resource.
>
> (I'm still undecided whether I agree that existential quantification is a
> distinguished feature of a resource or whether at some level *all*
> resources are thus quantified.  Following discussions in Boston, I do
agree
> that some distinction is needed for practical purposes when performing
> queries in an RDG graph, but I'm not yet sure that "Backwards E" is it.)
>
> #g
>
>
> ------------
> Graham Klyne
> GK@NineByNine.org
>

Received on Monday, 12 March 2001 09:53:24 UTC