- From: Steve Harris <steve.harris@garlik.com>
- Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 12:08:03 +0100
- To: Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr>
- Cc: "public-rdf-wg@w3.org WG" <public-rdf-wg@w3.org>
On 2012-09-07, at 11:41, Antoine Zimmermann wrote: > Le 07/09/2012 12:35, Steve Harris a écrit : >> Taking a step back, and thinking about what we (Experian) actually use bNodes for, to inform our position on the various scope questions. >> >> Basically, it's just a replacement for auto_increment columns in SQL. >> >> There are two motivations for this >> >> 1) it saves the data generating process from minting a globally unique identifier for it >> 2) it's more efficient in the store, as there's no need to store a text symbol for it >> >> This has been helped by Skolem URIs, as now we have an easy way to refer to them between SPARQL queries. >> >> Any other features of bNodes are just a distraction or inconvenience really. >> >> I'm sure other people have different reasons for using them, anyone care to share? > > > Bnodes are an absolute requirement for OWL to be serialised in RDF. Without bnodes, it would be impossible to define an RDF-based semantics for OWL which is (mostly) compatible with the direct semantics. What feature of bNodes makes the true though - that's what I was trying to get to. > Bnodes are very often used to express n-ary relations. Yup, for reasons 1) and 2) above, IMHO. > rdf:List without bnodes would be insane. Right, that's mostly a syntactic thing. - Steve -- Steve Harris, CTO Garlik, a part of Experian +44 7854 417 874 http://www.garlik.com/ Registered in England and Wales 653331 VAT # 887 1335 93 80 Victoria Street, London, SW1E 5JL
Received on Friday, 7 September 2012 11:08:33 UTC