Against the use of opaque triple terms in RDF - was Re: RDF-star "baseline" with IRI opacity

I do not understand why there is a need for opaque triple terms in RDF (or 
RDFS).  The only difference between the two in RDF and RDFS is that non-opaque 
triple terms do not entail opaque triple terms and in some formulations opaque 
triple terms do not entail non-opaque triple terms.  (See my previous message 
on why the latter is bad.)

Because in RDF and RDFS there is little difference between opaque and 
non-opaque triple terms why are they present?  Is there any use case using RDF 
or RDFS that depends on the difference?

In stronger formalisms like RDFS++ and OWL there is more of a difference, of 
course, and there may be reasons to want an annotation to care about an IRI 
itself as opposed to its denotaion.  But it is easy to build the effect of 
opaque triple terms from non-opaque triple terms.  All that is required is to 
have extra triples added to the annotation, as in
   _:b rdf:isAnnotationOf ( John married Suzy ) .
   _:b :source _:nyt .
   _:b rdf:subject "John"^^rdf:IRI .
   _:nyt :publication :NYT .
   _:nyt :date Tuesday .
This also allows a fine-grained version of opacity and even allows adding 
opacity to triples in an RDF graph after the fact.

So I don't see any positives to having opaque triple terms and, as they add 
considerable complexity, significant negatives.

peter

On 6/14/24 08:20, Franconi Enrico wrote:
> Hi,
> after the discussions last week arguing the non-intuitiveness of fully opaque 
> triple terms as literals, and after the comments that opaque tripe terms 
> should have transparent bnodes, I have prepared a new version of the baseline 
> document, where opaque triple terms have opaque IRIs and transparent bnodes:
> https://github.com/w3c/rdf-star-wg/wiki/RDF-star-"baseline-with-IRI-opacity” 
> <https://github.com/w3c/rdf-star-wg/wiki/RDF-star-"baseline-with-IRI-opacity">
> Note that annotations are not anymore functional with opaque triple terms 
> anymore, since it would make little sense with transparent bnodes in opaque 
> triple terms. Still, as I already discussed privately with some of you, even 
> without functionality we should still be able to capture the LPG use cases.
> See you later,
> —e.

Received on Friday, 14 June 2024 14:55:27 UTC