Re: Container Deprecation

Hi Ivan.

Perhaps my language seemed to reflect some conflation between containers
and collections, so I wasn't very clear.  I am thinking at a higher level 
of just something that contains something.  I don't care if it's an RDF
container or RDF collection.  All I want to do is represent a group of
things (loosely defined, I have avoided the word "set" here) in RDF.  It
would be nice to be able to say in a single statement:

<group> <contains> <thing> .

You cannot do this with RDF collections.  You can do it with RDF
containers using rdfs:member.  It seems that we should have some way of
doing this, regardless of whether RDF containers are deprecated.

Jesse Weaver
Ph.D. Student, Patroon Fellow
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~weavej3/
==============Original message text===============
On Mon, 29 Aug 2011 8:09:22 EDT Ivan Herman wrote:

Jesse,

- There is no formal resolution on containers yet. There has been some
discussions, and deprecating containers has indeed been raised as one of
the candidates.

- However, your usage of rdfs:member v.a.v. lists (a.k.a. collections) is 
a slightly different question. At them moment, there is no semantic
relationships in RDFS between the terms used for lists (rdf:first,
rdf:next, or rdf:List) and rdfs:member. Put it another way if I have 

<a> <b> (<c> <d> <e>) .

I cannot infer something like

<c> rdfs:member _:a . # _:a is the 'head' of the list above.

I may have misunderstood what you said, though.

Ivan




On Aug 26, 2011, at 20:59 , Jesse Weaver wrote:

> Hello RDF working group.
> 
> Has there been consensus concerning deprecation of RDF containers in 1.1? 
> Specifically, I am curious about the rdfs:member property.  It is very
> useful for stating membership of something in a uniform way (unlike using 
> rdf:_1, rdf:_2, ...) and in a single triple (unlike using rdf:first and
> rdf:rest).  I am well aware of the distinction between containers and
> collections, but it seems that RDF really needs something as simple as
> rdfs:member.
> 
> Please let me know.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Jesse Weaver
> Ph.D. Student, Patroon Fellow
> Tetherless World Constellation
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
> http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~weavej3/> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/mobile: +31-641044153
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===========End of original message text===========

Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2011 06:51:42 UTC