Statement identifiers

Reading the WG meeting minutes I get the idea that there is some reservation w.r.t. to statement identifiers in Souri's RDFn proposal as if they were a totally new and unproven idea. They have been around for decades in RDF/XML. Jerven Bolleman reported to the RDF-star CG that the UniProt project still uses RDF/XML because of the nice syntactic sugar that its statement identifiers provide for RDF standard reification. Standard reification has clear semantics: a reification quadlet creates a new identifier that refers to _some_ occurrence of a statement (without addressing that specific occurrence however). Multiple reification quadlets reify different occurrences, so no bag semantics. 

This mapping of statement identifiers to RDF standard reification is for multiple reasons not what I would consider sufficient for bridging the gap between LPG and RDF, but it is in line with what many of you seem to advocate: an approach that is merely able to record some provenance and can’t interfere with other statements, jeopardizing monotonicity. And as it is only and purely syntactic sugar for standard reification (*) I really wonder what there is not to understand or even fear about it.

Best,
Thomas


(*) Well, with one caveat: it does even more than a normal reification quadlet misleadingly suggest that it would address a specific statement occurrence as it is syntactically so tightly connected to such. It shares that problem with the shortcut syntax of RDF-star.

Received on Tuesday, 24 January 2023 00:37:12 UTC