Reification support in RDFa

During today's meeting we were discussing our current support for RDF
reification in our current syntax draft [1] which states:

[[[During subject resolution (which could be triggered by object
resolution for a rev attribute), the processor may traverse up the DOM
tree in search of an about  attribute. If a link or meta element is
encountered before an about attribute is found, and if this link or meta
element itself does not have an about attribute, then the subject (or,
again in the case of rev, object) is resolved as the [RDF/A statement]
represented by this link or meta  element.]]]

The main discussion point was who are the folks (such as IPTC and others
from HTML WG) asking for reification and what the real requirement is
for RDFa. Additionally, I brought up the point that the reification [2]
vocabulary is not either clearly defined, implemented or used today and
that we must be careful on taking on such a task. Reification in RDF M&S
leans towards identification of statements as opposed to quotation [3].
It's not clear which one we want in RDFa.

I'd like for us (everyone) to discuss more how do we really want to
approach reification in RDFa, especially since we have a better
situation due to us dealing with HTML documents. We have documents being
published on the web at specific locations and I think we have different
two major ways to frame the issue/requirement. We might want to track
provenance at the HTML/element level (e.g. who wrote what piece of HTML)
vs at the RDF level (who said which triple). I think one option is for
us to establish our purpose and provide a specific vocabulary to do so
without dragging the whole use/mention, bnodes, named graphs issues
attached with RDF reification and the communities trying to resolve it.

Any thoughts?

-Elias

[1]
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/2005-rdfa-syntax#id0x01cc64a0
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/#reification
[3] http://ioctl.org/rdf/usementionmyarse

Received on Monday, 16 October 2006 21:32:42 UTC