Re: multiple kinds of transparency; simplicity over complexity

On 17 Feb 2023, at 14:14, Vladimir Alexiev <vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com> wrote:

- Enrico Franconi proposed a distinction between "semantic" and "modal/epidemic" predications;
  which if I understand correctly correspond to referentially transparent vs referentually opaque annotated triples

No, not really.

I agree with Thomas that the "90% use" (or what they call the "main path" in use case diagrams) of rdf-star is to record extra data about triples,
not to deal with exceptional/controversial/sensational/prove-it-in-court kind of triples.
So I think we should look for ways to simplify our treatment, not to complicate it.

Well, I’m not sure which direction RDF wants to take: as a modelling language, or as annotation language, or both.
As a modelling language, it is easy to see that the most popular approaches (UML, Entity-Relationship, ORM) all have a primitive for semantic predication (association classes in UML, weak entities in E/R, and objectifications in ORM); even description logics have it [1,2].
It is clearly an option that the WG says that it wants to provide the means to represent only ‘annotations’ to syntactic triples, but then the WG should be transparent in saying that this is the case.

—e.


  1.  Alessandro Artale, Enrico Franconi, Rafael Penaloza, Francesco Sportelli: A Decidable Very Expressive Description Logic for Databases. ISWC (1) 2017: 37-52.
  2.  Alessandro Artale, Enrico Franconi: Towards a Logical Foundation of Reification in Modelling Languages. In: Ontology Makes Sense- Essays in honour of Nicola Guarino, IOS Press 2019: 242-256.