Re: Subjects as Literals, [was Re: The Ordered List Ontology]

Hi Richard!

>
> [trimmed cc list]
>
> On 2 Jul 2010, at 11:15, Yves Raimond wrote:
>>
>> I am not arguing for each vendor to implement that. I am arguing for
>> removing this arbitrary limitation from the RDF spec. Also marked as
>> an issue since 2000:
>> http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#rdfms-literalsubjects
>
> The demand that W3C modify the specs to allow literals as subjects should be
> rejected on a simple principle: Those who demand that change, including
> yourself, have failed to put their money where their mouth is. Where is the
> alternative specification that documents the syntactic and semantic
> extension? Where are the proposed "RDF/XML++" and "RDFa++" that support
> literals as subjects? Where are the patches to Jena, Sesame, Redland and
> ARC2 that support these changes?

This is a really unfair comment, Richard, and I am sure you realise
that. We are arguing for a very small modification of
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Literals - not of any
serialisation at the moment. Some of them happen to already support
that (the RDF subset of N3). The serialisation work is outside of the
scope of this discussion (but should happen, I agree) - let's stick to
small, iterative, improvements and bug fixes.

>
> The restriction seems to bother some people enough that they write noisy
> emails, but it apparently doesn't bother them enough to actually do anything
> about it.
>

Same thing - very unfair. We are being very specific about the change
we want made. Some of us implemented patches and libraries supporting
that (I wrote a swi-prolog one, Toby mentioned a Perl one, CWM
supports it since ages, as well as all other N3 engines). So, please,
if you want to criticise our proposal, do it on a sound basis, instead
of just trying to get as many people as you can very frustrated at the
way such decisions are being made.

Also, putting forward the "us vs. them" argument is not really the
best way to move forward, as I am sure you would agree. We suffered
from that in the LOD community a lot (and as Dan points out, still
suffer from that a lot in the whole Semantic Web community), so please
stop sending such emails anytime you feel in opposition with a
proposal, and let's have a fruitful debate.

> W3C's job should be to broker compromises between non-interoperable
> approaches by different vendors, and to foster adoption by putting its stamp
> of approval on already widely deployed technologies developed by the
> community. You know, the kind of stuff that actually came out near the top
> of the RDF Next Steps work item poll [1]: named graphs, Turtle, RDF/JSON.
>

W3C's job is also to provide bug-free specs, and interoperable one.
The fact that you can CONSTRUCT an invalid RDF document in SPARQL,
whilst still being valid SPARQL, is bad IMHO.

> Someone mentioned HTML 3.2 in this thread. Let me mention the ill-fated
> XHTML 2.0. A group of markup purists who were more interested in polishing
> the arcane details of the language, rather than meeting the interests of the
> heaviest users and the vendors. They did an enormous disservice to W3C and
> the web. The users and vendors turned their back on W3C, started their own
> effort, and W3C ultimately had to abandon XHTML 2.0 or risk to become
> irrelevant to the future of HTML.
>
> Literals as subjects feels very much like an XHTML 2.0 kind of feature to
> me.
>
> Or, coming at it from a completely different direction: I have yet to meet a
> person (except Nathan perhaps) who says, "Yeah that RDF stuff, I had a look
> at it but then saw that it does not support literals as subjects, so I gave
> up on it."

The same reasoning can be applied to all the things in the current
item poll: Turtle not existing didn't stop people publishing RDF/XML.
Named Graphs not being spec'ed out didn't stop them either. So I would
also argue this is a buggy argument, mostly there for drawing more FUD
on a thread that, I think, doesn't need more.

Best,
y

>
> Best,
> Richard
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2010/06/rdf-work-items/table
>
>
>>
>> That aside, I don't see your point about extra hardware. There is, in
>> my experience, no substantial difference between storing
>>
>> <#me> foaf:name "Ivan" and "Ivan" :name_of <#me>.
>>
>>> _not_enough_unique_ to interlink data.
>>
>> There are. Their value is their identity. They are *perfectly* unique.
>> "cat" is uniquely identifying the string made of c, a and t. From your
>> previous email, I suppose you're concerned about rounding for floats
>> and doubles, is that it? If so, whatever you write as their rounded
>> value is their identity (and we can't write "Pi"^^xsd:real afaik :) ).
>>
>>>
>>> [ ] str:double_metaphone_word "Acton" ; str:double_metaphone "AKTN" .
>>> and
>>> [ ] str:soundex_word "Smith" ; str:soundex "S530" .
>>>
>>
>> I agree this is another way to model it, and Jeremy suggested it as
>> well. But it creates a level of indirection and, from a modeling point
>> of view, does look very weird. If you were to extend that model to,
>> say, "1" list:in (1 2 3), that would look very nasty...
>>
>> Best,
>> y
>>
>>> are at least protected from collisions and allow more properties to be
>>> added in a safe way.
>>>
>>>
>>> Best Regards,
>>>
>>> Ivan Mikhailov
>>> OpenLink Software
>>> http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>

Received on Friday, 2 July 2010 12:09:31 UTC