Re: RDF semantics redux

Steve Harris wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 01:17:41AM -0600, Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
>> But, I have to say, all this seems like overkill. The same effect 
>> can be got by sticking to the local option, and requiring the 
>> server to supplying a special URIref as an answer binding to 
>> indicate an 'anonymous' entity, along the lines suggested by Andy 
>> in
>> 
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005OctDec/0159.html.
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> I like this.
> 
> It is what 3store has done for some years - originally it was a bug, 
> but I met with spritited objections when I said it was going to be 
> fixed, so I can report that users like it.

Ditto for Sesame/SeRQL. Although the issue is slightly less foggy in
SeRQL because it does not use bnodes-as-variables in the query syntax,
we have introduced virtually the same trick, using _: as a 'special'
namespace prefix to indicate bnode ids, which allows identifying bnodes
over multiple queries (though with big flashing red letters in the
documentation that this is not a good idea unless you know what you are
doing). It makes querying lists and foaf profiles a heck of a lot easier.

Jeen
-- 
Jeen Broekstra          Aduna BV
Knowledge Engineer      Julianaplein 14b, 3817 CS Amersfoort
http://aduna.biz        The Netherlands
tel. +31 33 46599877

Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2005 13:26:43 UTC