Re: Associations in RDF

I am not so sure that the problem is a lack in RDF. It seems more that simple
use cases tend to be attribute-based ones, such as the way people usually
approach Dublin Core. The value of RDF to me seems to lie precisely in the
fact that when what was thought of as a simple one:one attribute relationship
turns out to be more complex (authorship is not as simple a concept as people
tend to presume, being a many-one relationship of some complexity) no change
is needed to the data that has been recorded.

There are other cases where there are complex relationships likely to be
expressed straight away - the one I am familiar with is based on using EARL -
but we should not be surprised that people often start with simplistic
approaches and uses. Printing "hello world" doesn't need the power of Object
Oriented Programming or a repurposeable string representation. But they are
useful things to have, and printing "hello world" is how a lot of people
start to think about how to use them for real...

cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 MDaconta@aol.com wrote:

>
>Hi Decoy,
>
>In a message dated 7/21/02 11:49:04 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
>decoy@iki.fi writes:
>> The same holds of RDFS, too -- no property is declared to be a part of
>>  either the range or the domain. Again, the only reason we view such
>>  relations as having been degraded into attributes is that the relevant
>>  specs occasionally depict them that way and that the XML serialization
>>  looks like the subject is somehow more tightly bound to the properties
>>  than the object. The only time the principle breaks down is when one
>>  considers putting literals on the left side of a relation.
>
>I see your view that I am imparting a deficiency on RDF based on its
>serialization syntax and my semantics for the word "Property"; however, I
>think
>the effect of the above combination leads to what I would consider weak
>uses of RDF (class/attribute modeling) instead of modeling relations.
>
>> OK. Just for the fun of it I'll put the association stuff up on
>>  http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/shared/meta/rdf-stuff .
>
>Thanks for this!!  I'll check it out.
>
>Thanks for your feedback,
>
> - Mike
>----------------------------------------------------
>Michael C. Daconta
>Director, Web & Technology Services
>www.mcbrad.com
>

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Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2002 05:26:53 UTC