Re: A radical proposal. (was: Re: new names for g-box, g-snap)

On 2012-08-20, at 16:02, Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
> On Aug 20, 2012, at 8:30 AM, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
> 
>> * Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> [2012-08-20 11:39+0200]
>>> 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 think this is a proposal for the following term mapping:
>> gsnap -> representation
>> gbox -> resource
>> g{resource|label|whatever} -> resource name
>> 
>> I'm don't think I see how this substantially changes the semantics.
> 
> It isnt supposed to change it at all, only the terminology. 
> 
>> Would it be
>> 1 word substitution
>> 2 massaging of surrounding text to resonate better with the terms
>> 3 a new way to tilt your head and see the semantic web
> 
> Yes to 1 and 2, but I think that most people outside the WG and even the WG at weekends already think about RDF on the Web this way.
> 
>> ?
>> 
>> For either of the first tow, I'd be happy happy to see semantics in terms of g* and then have a bake-off later on to decide what terms would be most useful (leaving on the table the g* terms which are delightfully unambiguous).
> 
> Let me try the idea explicilty. We have become very, very careful to distinguish mathematical RDF graphs from concrete, mutable, data that encodes RDF graphs (things like RDF/XML or Ntriples documents.). All I am suggesting it, now we all have our ideas clear, that we can afford to be sloppy in using the terminology, and call them all just "graphs", and distinguish "fixed graphs" from "mutable graphs" when we need to be careful about that distinction, and distinguish "graph resources" (or RDF spaces or g-boxes) from "abstract graphs" when (more rarely) we need to be careful about that distinction, but most of the time we don't need to be careful, in fact, and neither does anyone else, so we can just use "graph" for everything until someone asks us to be more precise, and the sky will not fall.

+1

That is pretty much what terminology is used in Garlik/Experian for e.g. - I don't think anyone here (other than me) has read the semantics document, and only a couple of people know that a "graph" is formally a set of triples.

- Steve

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Received on Monday, 20 August 2012 15:23:50 UTC