- From: Reto Bachmann-Gmür <rbg@talis.com>
- Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:39:59 +0200
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- CC: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>, public-owl-dev@w3.org
Sandro Hawke wrote: > =?UTF-8?B?UmV0byBCYWNobWFubi1HbcO8cg==?= <rbg@talis.com> writes: > >> Sandro Hawke wrote: >> >>> ... >>> >>> It often seems to me that bnodes should have been left out of RDF. >>> They're useful, but also painful. (Or maybe, all things considered, >>> RDF should have been left out of RDF. :-) >>> =20 >>> >> If we want to keep RDF but drop something, there's only named nodes we >> can drop without loosing expressiveness. We would have to introduce an >> inverse functional property pointing to a URI-Literal. This would also >> make the owl:sameAs statement obsolete (it would just be one b-nodes >> with multiple name-properties). Another advantage would be that there >> are less arbitrary choices to take when describing a world with things >> with multiple names, currently you can arbitrarily decide which >> properties to associate with which of the same resources (the concept of >> having multiple things being the same, seems counter-intuitive to me >> anyway). >> > > Yes, indeed. I proposed this about six years ago [1], but never got > any traction with it. > > RDF has a clunky design. Most elegent, I think, would be bnodes + > strings + a uname property. Another approach would be to get rid of > bnodes (and, yes, sacrifice some functionality.) But, anyway, this is > water under the bridge. (Still, it's useful to talk about sometimes, to > at least acknowledge the issues, even if we can't fix them. Otherwise > people have a hard time learning it.) > Maybe the proposal to (re)introduce the '=' sign in turtle could be a step in the right direction as it leads to see more clearly that the name is very similar to a property and makes it more natural to add multiple names. [ = <http://eg.com/joe/>; = <http://eg.org/smith@me>; foaf:name "Joe Smith" ]. The problem with named nodes is less a technical one than and more a social/educational one as it makes resources with exactly one name appear special and makes it harder to explain that resources can have 0 or any number of names. reto > -- Sandro > > [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/12/uname/ > -- Reto Bachmann-Gmür Talis Information Limited Book your free place now at Talis Insight 2007 www.talis.com/insight Find out more about Talis at www.talis.com Shared InovationTM Any views or personal opinions expressed within this email may not be those of Talis Information Ltd.
Received on Thursday, 4 October 2007 09:40:12 UTC