Re: RDFa Last Call Comment: garbage collecting "useless" triples doesn't seem necessary and could hurt authors as they write RDFa

Hi Micah,

(I've taken your comments out of sequence.)

>  It's misplaced complexity to make authoring more difficult.

Just so that we're clear, this issue has nothing to do with authoring
complexity.

The question arose initially as to whether something like this:

  <div rel="a">
    <div rel="b" />
  </div>

is meaningful in any sense, since it consists only of bnodes that
refer to bnodes. (E.g., something knows a something that knows a
something...big deal.)

So I'm not sure that I can agree with you that:

>  If someone writes triples, they probably are not "useless" to that
>  author.

In this case it's difficult to argue that the triples are meaningful.
Note though, that the moment you add a non-bnode statement, they do
become useful:

  <div rel="a">
    <div rel="b">
      <span property="foaf:name">Micah</span>
    </div>
  </div>

And note that they become useful all the way down the chain. So
"something knows a something that knows a something called Micah", is
effectively "Micah is known by a something that has the property of
being known by something else".

Of course, you could argue that generating triples from the first lot
of mark-up is 'harmless', and I wouldn't disagree.

But it just so happened that whilst fixing some other stuff in the
parsing rules, it became very easy to inhibit these 'useless' triples,
so I did. Given that at the time there was a general feeling in the
group that these were 'spurious' triples, that seemed like not a bad
idea.

Regards,

Mark

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Received on Thursday, 20 March 2008 10:50:40 UTC