Re: How do RDF and Formal Logic fit together?

From: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>

> Now if you are saying that RDF specification should be changed so that
this
> information is part of RDF, then go ahead and make a proposal.

Yes, well Pat Hayes suggested that:

    " unfortunately RDF isn't quite good enough for that.  Its just
      *too simple* to be useable as a general  syntax model. If it had
      used quadruples instead of triples, or had some kind of context
      ..."

There are two ways that I know which would allow us to extend RDF into a
quadruple so that it has some context mechanism.  One way is to use a
statement Id, and the other is to use a context uri.   The more I think
about this,  the more I think that the context uri would be best.
Seralizing the context uri could be done like this:

<rdf  context="http://robustai.net/mentography/">
    < ..... a batch of xml\rdf seralized statemets ... >
</rdf>

RDF 2.0 compliant parsers would then include the context uri as the fourth
element of each quadrapule; if it were not present  they might substitute
the document url.   How else are we going to searlize in XML\RDF 2.0 the
contexts that N3 and Semenglish can express ?

I know this is a departure from what I suggested earlier, but it has the
advantage of not needing to come up with a scheme for making a globally
unique statement IDs, it's far easire to write, and it gives us a place to
put a context uri, which we needed anyway.

Seth Russell