Do you see any issue with adding a new attribute (eg reification) that provides the reification id to associate with a triple generated by that element? That way I could put a single meta element in the head and then have that reification available for creating other triples. For example,

   <meta about="[p:r1]" rel="p:p1" resource="[p:r2]" reification="p:id3"/>
   <meta about="[p:id3]" rel="dc:creator" resource="[p:me]" />


If this is reasonable, is there a process for making a proposal for a future enhancement?  My group is making extensive use of XHTML+RDFa, and pretty much every triple has these kinds of accounting triples. It would be nice to have some reasonably consise way of tying them together with the triple pattern itself.


Brian


On Jul 9, 2009, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com> wrote:

Hi Bryan,

Earlier drafts of RDFa did originally support reification by the use
of embedded <meta> and <link> elements in the <body>. However, since
Firefox moves those elements back into the <head> (at least at the
time, it did -- I haven't checked recently), it made it impossible to
implement a client-side RDFa parser that would work in all browsers.

We therefore decided not to include this technique in later RDFa
drafts, and since at the time there wasn't another proposal on the
table, there is no support for reification in RDFa.

Regards,

Mark

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 5:28 PM, <publicayers@verizon.net> wrote:
> I need to associate a triple with its reification id, then make triples on
> that id (for things like creator and created). The only way I can figure out
> to do this in RDFa is to make the triple in the usual way (with
> about/rel/resource), but also assert the reification triples on the subject,
> predicate, and object. I was planning on putting the reification triples in
> the head.
>
> It seems unfortunate to add 3 triples and their elements in the head for
> each triple in the body just to represent the mapping from reification id to
> a triple's subject, predicate, and object. The only other option I can come
> up with is to extend RDFa with a new attribute to give the reification id
> and have it expand into the 3 triples, something like
>
>   &lt;meta about="s" rel="p" resource="o" reification="id" /&gt;
>
> Since there isn't any special handling for reification in RDFa, I was
> wondering if it was discussed and rejected, and if so, what were the
> problems. Also, is there any inclination to expand RDFa sometime in the
> future for convenient handling of reification?
>
> Brian



--
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

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http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

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