RE: Placing a comment on a relationship?!

> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Graham Klyne

----( SNIP )------------

> (3) The Harmony project introduced an idea called ABC [3], a variant of 
> which has been picked up by some Dublin Core work [4], which allows one to 
> create a refined version of a property by creating a composed relationship 
> that indirects via an intervening node.  This doesn't directly address the 
> question you ask, but your mention of "there are/could be more refinements 
> of the property dc:relation" hints that this might be what you are really 
> trying to do.

----( SNIP )------------

> [3] http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/harmony/docs/abc/abc_draft.html
> (cf. section 3.4)
>      http://metadata.net/harmony/JODI_Final.pdf  (I think this is relevant)
> 
> [4] Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML:
>      http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml/

I've used the "composed relationship that indirects via an intervening 
node" approach with excellent results in building a specialized class 
library over an RDF library (C# and Drive in my case; I'm sure similar 
results would obtain with Java). 

The result is a very lightweight reification-like construct for instances 
of relationships, where each instance gets an rdf:ID, and the encapsulating 
library class shares interfaces with the library classes for both nodes (eg 
set/get properties) and edges (eg subject/object node). 

This approach might be much less appealing if one were approaching the graph 
from a tools environment rather than code, but for the class library 
situation, it seems to be a great answer. 

Regards,
Mike

Received on Thursday, 20 May 2004 15:44:16 UTC