- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:05:54 +0200
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, William Waites <ww@styx.org>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>, RDF Working Group WG <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On 9 April 2011 15:49, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote: > > On Apr 9, 2011, at 7:28 AM, William Waites wrote: > >> * [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. > > No, really, you have this wrong. It IS the idea of reification that is being deprecated; and this device that you have mentioned, of encoding an n-ary relation using a bundle of binary 'role' relations, is NOT reification. The two things are distinct. Using the name of one to refer to the other is going to cause a lot of confusion. Reification is using RDF to *describe* other pieces of RDF. This mixup has historical roots in the evolution of the original RDF Model and Syntax spec 97-99. I made a fairly lengthy writeup of this last year, filed under 'rdf:value', in anticipation of such WG discussions. Details at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2010Jul/0252.html The M+S reification vocab is supposed to for describing statements without them necessarily also being asserted; so using its 'rdf:value' as part of a pattern for making n-ary claims was just downright confusing. Ah well, better luck this time. cheers, Dan
Received on Sunday, 10 April 2011 15:06:23 UTC