Re: A modest proposal for reforming RDF

Drew McDermott wrote:

> Howeve, you're right that it's reasonable to have a way of serializing
> graphs in XML.  I would expect such a serialization technique to
> address issues such as distinguishing between directed and
> undirected graphs,

I don't think it's too much a stretch of the imagination to see a
undirected graph as a special case of a directed graph.  In other words one
interprets:

[A]---r--->[B]
[A]<---r---[B]
 as:
[A]---r'---[B]

> keeping track of cycles or declaring their absence,
> etc.

This is a non issue; easily solved at the application level.

> In the meantime, it seems to me there is a need for an XML-based
> notation for logical statements.

I agree .. perhaps someone from the KIF community will help us here.

> I don't think it needs to look
> radically different from RDF, but it does need to give up the graph
> model.

Why?  I can think of several ways to represent logical statements in RDF
and all of them need the graph model.  A logical statement is a tree, and a
tree is a special case of a labeled directed graph.

Seth Russell

Received on Monday, 18 December 2000 16:42:12 UTC