Re: proposal: a reifier should reify only one "thing"

> On 18. Apr 2024, at 17:41, Gregory Williams <greg@evilfunhouse.com> wrote:
> 
> On Apr 18, 2024, at 6:37 AM, Franconi Enrico <franconi@inf.unibz.it> wrote:
>> While I am against this choice on the ground that it would rule out several typical reification use cases, let’s assume I accept it.
>> 
>> We have two ways to look at it: 
>>     • 
>> the objects denote the same resource, but not their components s,p,o; 
>>     • the objects denote the same resource, and also their components s,p,o denote the same resource, respectively.
>> 
>> 
>> (1) We can still write triples that Amazon-et-al apparently find confusing (most of us do not):
> 
> 
> We all come from diverse backgrounds. I’m not sure if “us” was meant to mean WG members, or the RDF community/users, or something else, but I’d suggest we not make claims about what “most” people are or are not confused by here.

Sure speaking for "us" is always a bit difficult in heterogenous groups (and the WG is a heterogeneous group, not to mention the RDF community/users)  but I share the sentiment that there was at least a lot of surprise about the position Ora brought forward. "Some" of "us" would definitely not like to constrain the mechanism just for the sake of not irritating prospective LPG-convertants.

> I’m not sure I’d describe myself as being confused by (most of) your proposal, but I do think it addresses use-cases which I myself have never encountered, it adds complexity for implementations,

How?

> and (for myself) it adds mental complexity as I find the modeling counter to how I would naturally try to approach “statements about statements."

I bet you happily use named graphs for grouping ;-) Well, maybe, maybe not, but if you accept that named graphs have no semantics and should not be used for anything else than application-specific concerns, then how do you group things? And don’t you agree that grouping stuff by attributes is one of the most basic KR activities there is? That’s my use case, and to me its an absolute no-brainer, but if you don’t need it, don’t use it - completely fine by me! But formulating extra restrictions, performing operations at the heart of RDF, just to disable a potentially very (or maybe just marginally) useful feature? I’m really irritated by this fervor. I just can’t imagine who could actually get hurt, and how, if we leave this option open. Reminder: the annotation syntax doesn’t support it, so casual users won’t even note (which I could agree to be a good thing, given the LPG part of the target audience).

>> :w1 rdf:reifies <<( :liz : married :richard )>> .
>> :w1 :location :miami .
>> :w1 rdf:reifies <<( :liz :married-in :miami )>> .
>> :w1 :groom :richard .
>> :w1 rdf:reifies <<( :richard : married :liz )>> .
>> 
>> which by the way entails:
>> <<( :liz : married :richard )>> owl:same-as <<( :liz :married-in :las-vegas )>> .
> 
> 
> I do think this entailment might fall a bit closer towards “confused,” though. I thought I could get myself to an understanding of your reification use-case where the reified :w1 is in some way representing the marriage event. But this new entailment is saying that the triple terms themselves are the same, and I am really struggling to get an intuitive understanding of that. The triples do not represent the same relationship (one between two people, the other between a person and a location), and to me only start to have some connection once the reification or some other modeling of the wedding brings them together as being different aspects of the same event.

I fully agree with you here! This can’t be right.

Best,
Thomas

> thanks,
> greg
>

Received on Thursday, 18 April 2024 16:00:51 UTC