Re: Graphs, some quick comments

Andy,

That's an excellent response, and I fully agree with what you say.

However, just where is that used behind the interface model of RDF 
defined? Who's job is it to define it, and bringing this right back to a 
personal inter-group level, should the RDF API we're working on, which 
is for implementation behind the interface, and working with RDF data 
(whether that be simple usage, or querying, or reasoning and inference) 
have the same constraints?

And for that last question, if not, to what does it reference? Where is 
the generalized model?

 From everything I can tell, the restrictions are syntactic, even if 
that's an abstract syntax, and to quote the last RDF WG:

    noted that it is aware of no reason why literals should not be
    subjects and a future WG with a less restrictive charter may extend
    the syntaxes to allow literals as the subjects of statements.

So just where is, or should be, this un-syntax-restricted model (which 
many of us have came across or needed features of) be defined, if anywhere?

And I guess my point is, it does exists, it's just not written down, and 
it is different to the constrained syntactic RDF that's defined for use 
over the wire.

Best,

Nathan

Andy Seaborne wrote:
> Nathan,
> 
> Another way to look at it is that the key is exchange over the web.  RDF 
> is defined for exchange needs.
> 
> What happens within each site with that data isn't the focus of RDF 
> providing they meet the specs at the boundaries and the RDF semantics 
> define what conclusions can be drawn from the exchanged data. There can 
> be many different per-site processing models; what RDF provides is a way 
> to communicate over and above bytes and syntax.
> 
>     Andy
> 
> On 21/04/11 20:57, Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider wrote:
>> I don't think that this is correct.
>>
>> In my opinion RDF and RDFS is defined/constrained by its semantics, or
>> at least it should be!  In the RDF Semantics you find the bulk of the
>> technical details, and in RDF Concepts you find definitions of many of
>> the basic concepts of RDF, mostly in Section 6.
>>
>> Yes, RDF/XML, the only official exchange syntax for RDF, is not a
>> complete syntax for RDF graphs, but that is really a minor point.
>>
>> The stuff you mention below is not (yet?) a part of RDF.
>>
>> peter
>>
>>
>> From: Nathan<nathan@webr3.org>
>> Subject: Graphs, some quick comments
>> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:52:52 -0500
>>
>>> (just dropped these in #swig, copying here)
>>>
>>> RDF is defined/constrained by it's serializations currently, so anything
>>> in the model/abstract is in the serializations, so when we discuss
>>> things like multiple graphs, graph literals, named graphs, it's done in
>>> terms of syntax, when really there is hardly ever a case where you need
>>> multiple graphs in the syntax, other than when dumping stores or sets of
>>> data, and that ain't RDF.
>>>
>>> however, behind the interface you need this stuff all the time, but not
>>> over the wire, and RDF doesn't handle that.
>>>
>>> so, perhaps a higher problem is: RDF is defined in terms of on the wire
>>> needs, but RDF is used as a data model for working with data behind the
>>> interface, and the two have different requirements.
>>>
>>> if you look at the RDF Graph usecases on the wiki, you'll notice that
>>> most of them are about managing or working with data, and people are
>>> using the syntax of trig or quads to say what they mean - but only the
>>> dumping stores cases actually /require/ having anything in the
>>> serialization.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Nathan
>>>
>>
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 21 April 2011 22:51:10 UTC