RE: Reification - whats best practice?

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:

>>
>>> Quads are also a bad standard since they
>>> mean different things to different people; i.e. not a standard.
>>
>> That's precisely why they need to be standardized, to ensure
>> that they
>> mean the same things to different people :-)
>
> +1
>
> And my recommendation would be that the fourth component of
> a quad would be a graph name (which also would be optional).
>
> Named graphs are a generic extension which can be very strongly
> grounded in the RDF MT (since most of what you need is already
> there), and provide for all of the other use cases employing
> quads; and simply by defining the appropriate vocabularies.
>
> In a sense, it's fair to argue that named graphs are not an
> extension at all, since as resources, their definition is
> central to the RDF MT, and any resource can be denoted by
> URI, so if you're going to have quads rather than triples,
> named graphs are the option which "extend" RDF the least.
>

... and you can even get them quite easily into RDF/XML, simply by
allowing rdf:about/rdf:ID/rdf:nodeID on the <rdf:RDF> wrapper.
Although there are some good arguments for a completetly different
serialization syntax such as TriX...

Regards,
Karsten