Re: Blog post about "Provenance in RDF-star"

Hi Pierre-Antoine

Thank you for the post.

It is however important to understand that this basic design has
> limitations. Namely, each statement made about a particular triple must be
> interpretable independently of the other statements made about that triple.
> (This is actually a general feature of RDF, not just RDF-star: two
> statements about the same subject must always be interpretable
> independently from each other. On the open web, if we assume that another
> triple that we have not yet discovered could change the meaning of the
> triples that we know, then reasoning with what we know would become much
> more hazardous.)


I don't know if I'm right, but I feel like this is highly related to the
idea of statements being "simply true", as people have put it. To go back
to the first email in the "Three ideas" thread, I feel like time, space,
and confidence/certainty are the three annotations that make any statement
"simply true", i.e. make any statement able to stand alone as a complete
unit of description. It's definitely possible that I haven't thought deeply
enough about this, if so, maybe someone can show me a counterexample where
all those annotations are specified and the entire statement is not "simply
true". But if I'm right, and these annotations are special, they should be
given precedence and asserted first to avoid ambiguity like that described
in the blog post.

To further simplify things, time, space, and certainty could be three
positions, rather than four, if the temporal range is given typical "range"
syntax:

Subject Relation Object [T1, T2] SpatialBound Certainty

Any datatype that makes sense for certainty/confidence can be used in the
last position.

Then, with those three positions, the examples in the blog post could be
modified like so:

*Original extended first example:*

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
    :accordingTo :employee22, :employee38 ;
    :confidence 0.8 .

Would become:

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" _ _ "0.8"^^ex:confidence >>
    :accordingTo :employee22, :employee38 .

*Original problematic example:*

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
    :accordingTo :employee22; :confidence 0.2 .
    # we don’t trust employee22 about someone else’s job title

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
    :accordingTo :employee38; :confidence 0.8 .
    # we quite trust employee38 about their own job title

Would become:

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
    :accordingTo :employee22 _ _ "0.2"^^ex:confidence .

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
    :accordingTo :employee38 _ _ "0.8"^^ex:confidence .

*It's easy to see what a more complex example might look like:*

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" _ _ "0.8"^^ex:confidence >>
    :accordingTo :employee22 _ _ "0.2"^^ex:confidence .

<< :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" _ _ "0.8"^^ex:confidence >>
    :accordingTo :employee38 _ _ "0.8"^^ex:confidence .

Those three positions can be added to the other statement types I
described, and the whole system becomes consistent, scalable, and easy to
reason about. Apologies for being repetitive, but I really think the
holistic approach has a lot of benefits.

Regards
Anthony

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 8:13 AM Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
wrote:

> On 1/26/22 3:34 PM, Pierre-Antoine Champin wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> following a discussion during our two last calls, I published a post about
> "Provenance in RDF-star":
>
> https://www.w3.org/community/rdf-dev/2022/01/26/provenance-in-rdf-star/
>
> quoting the intro:
>
> > In this post, we present some lessons learned by the group through
> discussions and exchanges. This is meant to give some insight about the
> rationale behind RDF-star, and some guidelines about how to best use it for
> modeling provenance data.
>
> Many thanks to all the participants of the RDF-star group for their
> reviews and feedback on this post.
>
>   pa
>
>
> Hi Pierre-Antoine,
>
> An opening example in that blog post:
>
> PREFIX : <http://www.example.org/> <http://www.example.org/>
>
> << :employee38 :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" >>
>     :accordingTo :employee22, :employee38 ;
>     :confidence 0.8 .
>
> My variant using RDF as it exists.
>
> ## RDF-Turtle Start ##
>
> # PREFIX : <http://www.example.org/> <http://www.example.org/>
> PREFIX schema: <http://schema.org/> <http://schema.org/>
> PREFIX : <#>
>
> [
>   :jobTitle "Assistant Designer" ;
>   schema:identifier :employee38  # if desired, inverse-functional-property
> semantics can be applied to the schema:identifier relation.
> ] :accordingTo :employee22, :employee38 ;
>   :confidence 0.8 .
>
> ## RDF-Turtle End ##
>
> What is the difference between both? Is it that your RDF-Star example
> expresses a statement (*utterance*) while mine expresses a fact (
> *proposition*)?
>
> "A *statement* occurs at a particular time and place.  But a *fact* is
> independent of time and place." [1]
>
>
> Links:
>
> [1]
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/d37df77c62aa4cdab97ad92a30821600%40bestweb.net
> -- John F. Sowa post about statements and facts
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen 
> Founder & CEO
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