Re: RDF-ISSUE-25 (Deprecate Reification): Should we deprecate (RDF 2004) reification? [Cleanup tasks]

* [2011-04-09 13:09:15 +0100] Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de> écrit:

] ISSUE-25 is about the RDF reification vocabulary, which is a
] built-in vocabulary for reifying *statements*. You are talking 
] about a common modeling practice in domain vocabularies for
] reifying *relationships*. That has nothing to do with ISSUE-25.

Right, that was what I wanted to have explicitly clear. It's not the
idea or practice of reification that is to be deprecated but the
baked-in support for reifying binary relations.

Whilst I support this, I think the distinction between *statements*
and *relationships* is highly artificial. A statement is just a binary
relationship. The only reason the number 2 is special and the reason
that RDF is not prolog, is because it is the smallest arity in which
you can expres arbitrary arity relations *if you use reification*.
Because 2 is special we have a special vocabulary for dealing with it,
but that turns out not to be especially useful because there's direct
support in the language for it, and the remaining use for it,
provenance, we have better ways of handling.

Cheers,
-w
-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww@styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww@styx.org>
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Received on Saturday, 9 April 2011 12:28:26 UTC