Re: Reification - whats best practice?

Eric Jain wrote:

> Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> 
>> I would like to ask about a subject I tried before but got no real 
>> response to.  All the problems that people hope to solve using quads, 
>> reification, etc., can be solved if the predicate of a statement were 
>> to be an instance rather than a generic type (and such an instance, 
>> with its own URI, were not to be used for more than one statement).
> 
> 
> Too verbose? Statements about statements are usually less important than 
> the statements themselves, which would be obscured somewhat.
> 

Statements about statements are crucial to a wide range of problems, 
ones that keep popping up in this list.  That's why people want quads 
and contexts.


> Also, if the predicate was required to be an instance, wouldn't there be 
> infinite recursion?
> 

C'mon, get serious!  Every edge drawn in a graph is an individual edge. 
   Try it yourself with pencil and paper. What is recursive about this 
(ignore picky details, please)?

Edge rdf:type Property-that-can-have-instances
e1 rdf:type Edge
subject1 e1 object1
e1 me:statedOnDate "8-31-2004"
e1 me:statedBy "T. B. Passin"

e2 rdf:type Edge
subject1 e2 object2
e2 me:statedBy "Some One. Else"

As I said, you need an additional constraint, or maybe two - don't reuse 
e1 and e2 in any other statements, and don't subclass e1 or e1 (which 
you probably can't anyway since they are individuals and not classes).

Verbose?  How could you say something about a statement more concisely 
than that?

Cheers,

Tom P

-- 
Thomas B. Passin
Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web (Manning Books)
http://www.manning.com/catalog/view.php?book=passin

Received on Tuesday, 31 August 2004 20:45:25 UTC