Re: remove hydra:Resource and hydra:Class

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 12:58:30PM +0100, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> For reasons of simplicity and vocabulary reuse,
> could we remove hydra:Resource and hydra:Class?
> 
> Right now, everything in the Hydra Core Vocabulary
> is a hydra:Resource, and all classes are hydra:Class.
> 
> The only difference between hydra:Resource and rdfs:Resource
> is that hydra:Resource instances are dereferenceable;
> and rdfs:Resource itself adds no semantics whatsoever, since
> “all things described by RDF are instances of the class rdfs:Resource” [1].
> 
> Dereferenceability is orthogonal to ontological relationships,
> and should IMHO be a recommended practice in the spec
> rather than an ontological relationship. It does not add anything at all:
> - If a client wants to dereference, the absence of hydra:Resource
>   does *not* mean something is *not* dereferenceable.
> - If a client wants to dereference a hydra:Resource,
>   it takes the exact same steps it would for something
>   that is not explicitly labeled a hydra:Resource.
> - The only difference is the “guarantee” offered by the ontology
>   that something is dereferenceable; but actually doing the dereferencing
>   and finding out whether something is dereferenceable
>   involves the exact same step, i.e., GETting the thing.
>   No gain there.
> 
> In addition, hydra:Class is simply the disjunction
> of hydra:Resource and rdfs:Class,
> so by the above reasoning, we can simply make it rdfs:Class.
> 
> It seems to me that hydra:Resource and hydra:Class
> are artifacts of something that no longer has importance.
> I therefore propose to simplify and clarify the ontology by:
> - removing hydra:Resource and mentions of it;
> - removing hydra:Class and replace mentions of it by rdfs:Class.
> If necessary, we can add something to the spec about dereferencing,
> but I don't think that this would add something.
> 
> Any thoughts on this?
> If we all agree, I can make the necessary edits to the spec.

Completely agree. While I appreciate the sentiment, dereferenceability
cannot be enforced at the semantic level anyways.

-- 
Chris Chapman

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