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

Jonathan,

I tend to agree, on all counts.

#g
--

At 09:38 AM 3/12/01 -0500, Jonathan Borden wrote:
> >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
> >

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

Received on Monday, 12 March 2001 12:56:29 UTC