Re: Subjects as Literals

On Jun 30, 2010, at 8:59 PM, Ross Singer wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>  
> wrote:
>> Great - more crystallization of the problem.
>>
>> On 01/07/2010 02:14, "Ross Singer" <rossfsinger@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I suppose my questions here would be:
>>>
>>> 1) What's the use case of a literal as subject statement (besides
>>> being an academic exercise)?
>> I would have thought the same as a use case for a literal as object.
>> I want to say:
>> "Semantic Web Revisited" foo:isTitleOf bar:somePaper
>> Why should I be forced to say
>> bar:somePaper dcterms:hasTitle "Semantic Web Revisited"
>> ? Seems pretty arbitrary to me.
>
> Actually, your example seems pretty arbitrary.  The latter,
> <http://example.org/foo> dcterms:title "Semantic Web Revisited" is
> conventional

It is conventional *because* the RDF restriction has forced it to be  
written this way round. Your argument is thus circular in several ways  
at once.

Pat Hayes


> and convention seems pretty important for the semantic
> web to work right.
>
> Just because you feel like you should do it doesn't mean you should.
> RDF/XML is a pain in the butt to parse because there a million ways to
> serialize it.  Your example is doubly uncompelling since bar:somePaper
> dcterms:title "Semantic Web Revisited" *works* and pretty much any
> agent would be able to deal with it and understand it.
>
> I don't really care one way or the other about this topic, but I think
> this needs to move beyond some theoretical inverse relationship to
> make the argument.
>
> -Ross.
>
>

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Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 03:11:04 UTC