RE: Reification - whats best practice?

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Karsten Otto wrote:

>
> 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...

+1

or something like

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2004Feb/0209.html

which is supported by our RDFStore triple-store and RDF/XML parser if
somebody needs it (yes quads inside - which are very useful but not standard and so forth...)

anyway - worse, it seems this discussion topic is recurring every 6 months
or so in the past 2/3 years :) and we can not find a common agreement how
to do it - might be now is the right time to try to tackle it again due
people are start looking more seriously at RDF?

Named-graphs work looked promising anyway...any hope to see that work published as W3C or IETF note or similar?

Yours

Alberto