Re: URI aliases for RDF terms?

On 9 Nov 2011, at 20:26, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
>> IMO W3C should:
>> 
>> 1. Assign short URIs in a *single* namespace for all RDF and RDFS (and possibly OWL and XSD) concepts *now*
>> 2. Leave it up to individual WGs to adopt those short URIs at their own leisure
>> 3. Leave it up to implementers to add support for them already
>> 4. The RDF WG should *not* do anything about them in RDF 1.1, but perhaps in RDF 2.0
> 
> Every evolution path I see from this leads to either fragmentation or unrealistic implementation demands. The options I see are:
>  a. do nothing.
>  b. gradual introduction of redundant short terms, followed by gradual redaction of longer names. -- good bye cardinality
>  c. international change-over day. -- all the air traffic control and clinical support systems relying on RDF will crash that day.
>  d. stake out short syntactic forms for use in turtle in SPARQL but leave the denotations the same.

Consider the evolution path for unifying "foo" and "foo"^^xsd:string: Both exist side by side in the wild and query authors have to deal with that. Increasingly, we will have systems that know that both are equivalent, e.g., those with D-entailment support and those with RDF 1.1 support. Both forms will continue to be deployed in the wild forever but which one to use will be merely a matter of taste.

It would be the same with <http://n.w3.org/rdf/type> and <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type>. Just replace “D-entailment” with “owl:equivalentProperty entailment” and “RDF 1.1” with “RDF 2.0”.

Best,
Richard

Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2011 21:24:28 UTC