reification (editorial)

On 05/28/2013 03:41 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 5/20/13 11:39 AM, Henry Story wrote:
>> In Turtle there is no way of specifying a graph (other than through 
>> reificiation which
>> is understood to be broken).
>
> Why is reification assumed to be broken? I think the perception is 
> that its cumbersome due to data bloat. Like blank nodes, this is a 
> feature of RDF that's often misunderstood and then in the process 
> maligned.
>
> Reification is the powerful mechanism for granular descriptions of 
> triples (statements) without exiting existing RDF semantics.
>

I wonder if there's some useful guidance we can give about when/how to 
use reification, or if it's best to just remain silent.   There will be 
a very strong temptation for some people to represent datasets in graphs 
using reification, but (as Henry pointed out) that's very hard to do 
because datasets are referentially opaque while reification is 
referentially transparent.  (Of course it's possible to make a 
referentially opaque reification vocabulary (as I did in [1]), but it's 
pretty awkward.)    Anyway, since we decided not to deprecate 
reification, I think (as an editorial matter) it would be excellent if 
we could give some helpful advice about it. If someone thinks they could 
draft that advice such that it would get WG consensus, that'd be great.

         -- Sandro

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rif-in-rdf/

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 12:29:39 UTC