Re: Annotations and the Graph

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 4:41 PM Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi Randall, Jacob,
>
> There are three issues with the proposal that I can see.
>
> One concern about the proposal is that rdf:Statement reifies a single
> triple, and an Annotation has significantly more flexibility.  For example,
> there may be no body to an Annotation, which would result in a statement
> with no subject.  Or for multiple bodies or multiple targets, there would
> be multiple subjects or objects respectively.  That's not the intent of
> rdf:Statement and related predicates, and I would be hard pressed to argue
> that it was kosher to subclass it.
>

I did suggest that Annotation could actually 1 or more rdfs:Statement
associated with it, rather than being an rdfs:Statement itself, but I was
trying to squeeze it into a shape that would be backward compatible with
many existing annotations, to make it more palatable.

I'm still not sure I'm convinced that an annotation without a body is a
useful thing. I know we debated it and decided to include it. I can't
remember why. It would seem to me any such annotation could have a stub
body. Or, more likely, that there is no annotation, there is only the
production of a SpecificResource.

You could say that bookmarking is an annotation with the bookmarking
motivation that has no body. Or you could just say that you have a bookmark
(the body) and it refers to the target. Whether you even need an annotation
as a separate resource here is questionable to me.


>
> Secondly, motivation and predicate are not really the same thing, as has
> become clearer with the adoption of the role proposal to allow motivations
> to be associated per body.  For example, if you had a single Annotation
> with a motivation of bookmarking, and a body with a role of describing,
> plus a second body with a role of tagging, the use of rdf:predicate seems
> very difficult to work with.
>
>
It seems easier to me, though difficult to put them all into a single
annotation. Again, though, here I am confused about what the model is
attempting to do. It seems like it's trying to double as a simple container
when really the user could create a container and give it provenance and
have it contain all the annotations, one which describes and another which
tags. Or maybe you have a resource "Bookmark" which can have properties for
tags and descriptions, and the predicate relates the bookmark and the
annotation.

Why should we avoid instantiating a Bookmark and instead create an
Annotation that refers to some tags, some text, and some link, and
complicates the relationship between them?


> And finally ... we already have rdf:Statement (and the recommendations
> against its use) and named graphs. If an Annotation were restricted to just
> a single statement, I'm not sure that we would need a new specification :)
>

Thanks for making my point for me.

SpecificResource and the selector vocabulary is great and I don't see
anything that exists quite like that.

But we have mechanisms to distribute statements with attribution. I don't
understand what the model adds to that other than, it seems, a way to
obfuscate the semantics and avoid actually creating triples that relate the
body and target.

In a sense, it seems to me like the purpose of much of the model is to
escape from having to model that which we want to model.