Re: Well-formedness for option 3

On Feb 29, 2024, at 8:11 AM, Franconi Enrico <franconi@inf.unibz.it> wrote:
> 
> They both talk about my birth.
> It is the prototypical example of reification of n-ary relations.

They both talk about *different aspects* of your birth. I’ll defer to your understanding of the theoretical grounding of reification here, but I can’t square this example with any use-case I’d want to use with this data.

There’s a relevant W3C Note[1] on this issue with this "N-ary relations and reification in RDF” section:

>> It may be natural to think of RDF reification when representing n-ary relations. We do not want to use the RDF reification vocabulary to represent n-ary relations in general for the following reasons. The RDF reification vocabulary is designed to talk about statements—individuals that are instances of rdf:Statement. A statement is a object, predicate, subject triple and reification in RDF is used to put additional information about this triple. This information may include the source of the information in the triple, for example. In n-ary relations, however, additional arguments in the relation do not usually characterize the statement but rather provide additional information about the relation instance itself. Thus, it is more natural to talk about instances of a diagnosis relation or a purchase rather than about a statement. In the use cases that we discussed in the note, the intent is to talk about instances of a relation, not about statements about such instances.


I think that’s a pretty good summary of the issue I’m having with this example. I’m coming at it from the perspective of wanting to “talk about statements” (and also about wanting to be able to have model compatibility with LPG edges), and that is very much complicated if the name (or reference, resource, or whatever) used in place of the statement doesn’t actually uniquely identify a statement.

We’ve talked in the past about having a compatibility definition for how our current work would map back to RDF 1.1 reification. I think this one “name” for multiple triples also causes problems for that sort of compatibility. You’d have an rdf:Statement with one rdf:subject, and two each of rdf:predicate and rdf:object. I’m not sure what such a statement would mean or how it would be useful.

thanks,
.greg

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/

Received on Thursday, 29 February 2024 18:26:20 UTC