- From: Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net>
- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:39:10 +0200
- To: "'Pat Hayes'" <phayes@ihmc.us>, "'Sandro Hawke'" <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: "'W3C RDF WG'" <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On Friday, August 17, 2012 6:21 PM, Pat Hayes wrote: > Maybe we should look at how other contexts handle this issue. After > all, the contrast between a labile thing and its state is pretty > universal. Take a vanilla web page, for example, > [...] > So web pages (in fact, all > information resources identifed by URIs; I would hazard a guess) are > all state-bearing entities rather than a bunch of stuff in one of their > states. But, as I say, other communities seem to take this in their > stride. I fully agree with this. Looking at it from a REST perspective basically all you can do is to exchange representations (the current state) of resources. As soon as you receive that representation it might already be outdated. > Perhaps we should not define a graph to BE a set, but rather define it > to be any RDF document or structure which *parses* to a set. So we keep > the idea of the set-based abstract syntax, but we morph the terminology > to be more in line with the way most of the world actually speaks and > thinks. +1 > Under this proposal (which, to emphasise, is purely one of terminology, > not actual content) we would say that an RDF/XML or an Ntriples > document actually *is* an RDF graph. Well, to be clear, it is a representation of an RDF graph, isn't it? > And when a URI resolves to such a > thing, we say that it resolves to a graph; and when people talk of > adding triples to a graph, we smile benignly instead of throwing a > hissy fit. (Of course, this changes the graph: it is now a different > graph, once one has made a change to it: but still, it is a graph.) And > now the labile/fixed contrast becomes a fairly standard and easy-to- > accept contrast between things that are allowed to change and things > that, for some reason, are not, instead of being a contrast between two > fundamentally different *kinds* of thing. And then the only people who > need to talk about mathematical sets at all, would be people checking > that parsers work properly. +1 > It would take us a while to get used to this change, but I think that > once we had gotten used to it, we and everyone else would feel a great > sense of relief. And Richard and myself would have to rewrite parts of > the Concepts and Semantics text, but again I dont think it would be > very difficult. > > Comments? I really like this proposal as it brings the terminology much closer to other Web architecture terminology... I think it would be well worth the effort. -- Markus Lanthaler @markuslanthaler
Received on Monday, 20 August 2012 09:39:39 UTC