From syntactic to interpreted triple

[I hope I’m using the right terminology in the right way. Advice is welcome.]

The proposed semantics defines that the embedded triple refers to a triple on the syntactic level, not in the realm of interpretation. In defense of this rather peculiar arrangement Pierre-Antoine and Dörthe argued that going from the syntactic to the interpreted triple is always possible whereas the other way round it is not: once a triple is part of the interpretation we can not know what its original syntactic structure was. That’s true (at least in any normal setup) but let's assume I’d like to annotate not the syntactic triple but the interpreted triple. What would I actually have to do to construct a reference to an interpreted triple from an RDF* embedded triple?


Lets for example assume someone published the triple 

 :cars :are :bad .

As he published that statement on the semantic web we can assume that his intend was to refer not only to :cars but just as well to :automobiles, :voitures etc. Now if we want to comment on that general interpretation of this statement, irrespective of the concrete vocabulary used, irrespective of any syntactic specifics, how would we do that? The proposed semantics of

 << :cars :are :bad >> :a :disputedClaim .

doesn’t cover this very common case as the embedded triple only refers to that very specific syntactic form. From this RDF* statement we couldn’t infer that 

 << :automobiles :are :bad >> :a :disputedClaim .

even if we were using a reasonably complete mapping of car related vocabiularies. Adding all those derivable embedded triples to the database is not a viable option as it would increase operational costs enormously. We need a way to derive a reference to the interpreted triple from the syntactic triple that the RDF* embedded triple represents. But how?


Thomas

Received on Thursday, 21 January 2021 12:41:20 UTC