- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 23:33:54 +0100
- To: Enrico Franconi <franconi@inf.unibz.it>
- Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, RDF Data Access Working Group <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
On Aug 4, 2006, at 11:11 PM, Enrico Franconi wrote: > >> Can you give references for all this terminology that you cite? >> What exactly is the "active" domain? There is nothing in any >> semantic theory that I know of that distinguishes *things in the >> domain* on the basis of the kind of name that is used to refer to >> them with. The idea does not make sense, in any case: if bnodes >> were obliged to refer to a non-active domain while names refer to >> something else, then the troublesome redundancies would be >> eliminated. > > The first entry in <http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22active > +domain%22+database> is a survey in DBs written 20 years ago. > >> I have never previously heard of this terminology of >> "distinguished" vs. "nondistinguished". (You have everyone's >> permission at this point to roll your eyes in amusement at my >> profound ignorance, of course.) I would be interested to see where >> this terminology was first used, and what its history is. In a >> database context where there are no bnodes, the distinction would >> be vacuous. > > Ah. Second and third entries in <http://scholar.google.com/scholar? > q=distinguished%20variables> are DB references from almost 30 years > ago. And Pat's own acquaintance with some variants of the latter terminology: http://daml.semanticweb.org/listarchive/joint-committee/1024.html http://pride.daml.org/listarchive/joint-committee/1125.html and http://daml.semanticweb.org/listarchive/joint-committee/1027.html I believe the most deeply nested quote is Richard Fikes, the next level Pat, and the final line richard (in spite of the quote mark): """> >answer will include a binding for each distinguished variable. I am > >referring to the variables in the query pattern that are not > >distinguished variables as "non-distinguished variables". > > undistinguished variables? >From a quick check on the Web, I find them being called "nondistinguished variables".""" I don't expect Pat to have remembered this. It was, after all, 5 years ago. It seems there is precedent for semi-distinguished variables in DQL. Richard Fikes seems (without having examined all the email) to have been the driver. DQL reference is the third hit: http://www.google.com/search? hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en&q=distinguished+variable&btnG=Search Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Friday, 4 August 2006 22:33:24 UTC