- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:57:35 +0200
- To: Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com>
- Cc: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, public-rdf-wg@w3.org
On 28 April 2012 11:58, Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com> wrote: > On 28/04/12 05:49, Sandro Hawke wrote: >> My concern is with how people >> use the term in practice, and whether that usage conflicts with the >> formal definition. > > General usage is sloppy, imprecise and changes as convenient. Ambiguity in > spoken language is normal. We all manage. But we are not all managers. Yes, we have same issue with 'property', 'triple', 'statement' and others; each might (if we're lucky) have a precise W3C RDF meaning, but they shade into other related uses that there can't be such strict standardised control over. Property is probably the oddest. Sometimes in computing 'color', 'size' etc. are themselves called properties, sometimes the size of some particular thing is counted as one of its properties, and if it had two different colours, they're each a property. So RDF properties are close cousin to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_(programming) but different too; I think we gain more by neighbourhood benefits than we suffer from sloppyness and confusion there. "Named graph" by contrast is pretty much our phrase to do with as we will (e.g. first page of google results are all "ours") . My guess is that usage will get murky if we don't have a sloppier not-so-nitpicky phrase also to throw around. I've pretty much convinced myself that "layer" is the best metaphor there, and that we could productively encourage talk of data 'layers' while leaving 'named graph' as the thing that has a much more rigid official meaning. cheers, Dan
Received on Saturday, 28 April 2012 10:58:04 UTC