Re: Blank nodes and predicates

>At the moment, rq23 allows blank nodes in the predicate position 
>both in the definition of a triple pattern and in the grammar.  I 
>changed the definition recently to make the syntax and the 
>definitions consistent.  There are approved syntax tests with bnodes 
>in the predicate position but, being syntax tests, the tests do not 
>given any clue as to what is supposed to happen.
>
>The text in 2.5.2 that describes how to do simple entailment 
>matching would cover the case of blank nodes in the predicate 
>position.  Pat said in the telecon (26 jan 06) that a blank node in 
>the predicate position would never match under entailment.
>
>Looking for experience, I tried cwm.  cwm allows blank nodes in the 
>predicate position in rule matching.
>
>I tried --
>
>@prefix : <http://example/> .
>:x :p 1 .
>{ ?x _:p 1  } => { ?x :q 2 } .
>
>and got :x :q 2 . in the resulting graph.
>
>I have added this as a test case in tests/data/BasicGraphPatterns
>http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/tests/data/BasicGraphPatterns/
>
>We need to be consistent: if they can match then we can allow them 
>in both syntax and definition of a triple pattern.  If they don't, 
>then I see it as confusing to allow them in the syntax or definition 
>of triple pattern.

I agree.

There is an issue that I didn't think of earlier, I confess. 
Consider this trivial example:

Dataset
:a :p :b .

Query
SELECT ?x WHERE { :a _:bb ?x .}

Should this succeed with x/:b ? Or should it fail? Right now it 
fails, because the query pattern has no legal RDF instances. But if 
we were to treat query bnodes as blank query variables, then it would 
succeed, since then the answer mapping (x/:a, _:bb/:p) would make the 
illegal pattern into legal RDF.

Now, even though we havn't treated bnodes as blank variables, this is 
a very string intuition, as comments have already pointed out. And 
moreover it is a sound intuition all the way up through RDFS and 
maybe even further. So, allowing bnodes in property position in query 
patterns seems to require us to take a rather firm stance against a 
strong and useful intuition. Which might not be good.

So, I suggest that we either eliminate property-bnodes from the 
syntax, or else (my preference) we treat query bnodes as being just 
like blank variables, so that this query would succeed, conforming to 
cwm usage. This makes semantic sense for RDF and RDFS. It would be 
ruled out as ill-formed for OWL-DL in its current strictly 
"first-order" incarnation, but an OWL version will need to impose 
many syntactic constraints on query patterns anyway, so this will 
just be one more to add to the list.

Pat


>	Andy


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Received on Monday, 30 January 2006 18:52:06 UTC