Re: RDF Investigations

Hi Gregg,

Interesting.

You may like the example

   www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent

For the non-aggregation parts of the example, the formal semantics in
effect are described in

  Backchain Iteration: Towards a Practical Inference Method that is Simple
  Enough to be Proved Terminating, Sound and Complete. Journal of Automated
  Reasoning, 11:1-22

                      Cheers,  -- Adrian

Internet Business Logic
Open Apps for Open Data
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English Q/A Apps
over SQL and RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com
Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements

Adrian Walker
Reengineering



On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Gregg Reynolds <dev@mobileink.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> A couple of years ago I got the idea of finding alternatives to the
> official definition of RDF, especially the semantics.  I've always
> found the official docs less than crystal clear, and have always
> harbored the suspicion that the model-theoretic definition of RDF
> semantics offered in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/ was unnecessary, or
> at least unnecessarily complicated.  Needless to say that is my own
> personal aesthetic judgment, but it did motivate my little project.
>
> I guess the past two years have not been completely wasted on me; what
> was a somewhat vague intuition back then seems to have matured into a
> pretty clear idea of how RDF ought to be conceptualized and formally
> defined.  Clear to me, anyway; whether it is to others, and whether it
> is correct or not is a whole 'nother matter.
>
> Since pursuing this idea will involve a lot of writing I won't pursue
> it here; instead I've described the the basic ideas in a blog post at
> http://blog.mobileink.com/.  The allusion to Wittgenstein, that great
> philosophical therapist, is entirely intentional.  You (or at least I)
> find out a lot of things when you analyze a concept very closely; if
> my analysis is not mistaken, there are some fundamental problems in
> the land of RDF.  For example, it is possible to show, among other
> things, that the concept of a graph is not essential to RDF; nor is
> the treatment of the Property node of a triple as an arrow or relation
> necessary; nor is the concrete semantics defined in the RDF Semantics
> document the only or even the best "theory" of RDF.  (Maybe this is
> all obvious to the cognoscenti, but insistence that RDF just is a
> graph is very common.) On the positive side, thinking about RDF as a
> mathematical domain (or domains), independent of RDF as a language,
> leads to a pretty substantial improvement in clarity; and since it
> requires a certain amount of creativity it's just fun.
>
> The reason I'm posting this here is because I will need some help,
> especially from real mathematicians and logicians.  A category
> theorist, for example.  Not only to check my reasoning; my hope is
> that others interested in pursuing this line of thought might come up
> with yet other fresh ideas.
>
> Plus, I've had a lot of fun thinking along those lines, and since a
> lot of people on this list spend a lot of time thinking about RDF
> (among other things), I thought they might find it interesting and fun
> as well.  The plan is to post a series of blog articles fleshing out
> the ideas in coming months, so if anybody would like to help or
> collaborate please let me know.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gregg Reynolds
>
>