RE: Concepts (almost) ready

Thanks Pat for the review!

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 10:40 AM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> > On 17 Dec 2013, at 05:25, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
[...]
> > 1.2  "Unlike IRIs...blank nodes do not denote specific resources."  I
> > know we have been through this before, but this statement still makes me
> > shiver, because blank nodes *do* denote resources, just as IRIs do, so a
> > very large burden is being placed here on that word "specific". This
> > would be both more accurate and read better if it said "..do not
> > identify specific resources". The document does use "identify " in this
> > sense in other places (eg 1.3), and it is widely used in the sense in
> > other foundational Web documents, in particular the WebArch document
> > which discusses IRI collisions.

I'm fine with replacing

  "Unlike IRIs and literals, blank nodes do not *denote* specific resources"

with

  "Unlike IRIs and literals, blank nodes do not *identify* specific resources"

We could perhaps also clarify it by adding a

  "... but simply indicate the existence of some unknown resource"

(perhaps with a better word for "indicate")


> > 1.5 "It does not deal with time, and..." I think this is better
> omitted. It could be misunderstood as denying the following paragraph.
> The rest of the sentence says what needs to be said more clearly.
> 
> Would be fine with me.

+1


> > ?? 1.6  Might it be helpful to put an informative reference to
> Antoine's semantic survey right after "There are many possible uses for
> RDF datasets." ?
> 
> +1, the document should absolutely be referenced somewhere,

Yeah, but this is probably not the right place as Antoine's document doesn't talk about use cases but possible semantics. I would propose to add something like the following sentence to the note in section 4:

  A discussion of different RDF Dataset semantics can be found in [RDF11-DATASETS].

(probably needs some wordsmithing)


> > 4.  "Blank nodes MAY be shared between graphs in an RDF dataset."
> Um, I now see that this can be understood in different ways. What I
> think (hope) is intended here is, that if the same bnodeID is used in
> two graph documents in the same dataset, then that means that those two
> graphs do share a bnode. But what it could be read as saying is that
> whether or not they share the bnode is optional: they might or they
> might not. Which would be a very unfortunate reading.
> 
> You are right.
> 
> How about simply lowercasing the MAY? It's not meant as something
> that's optional for conformance, but simply to indicate a possibility.
> So, MAY in the RFC2119 sense is inappropriate.
> 
> Alternatively, “can be shared”.

+1 to "can be shared".


> > [[IMPORTANT]]  In the Note:  "... the graph name does not formally
> denote the graph."  This is wrong as stated, and kind of dangerous in a
> normative section as it seems to prohibit graph names from *ever*
> denoting graphs. Also the use of "formally" seems to suggest two kinds
> of denotation (formal and informal) which is misleading. Any of these
> alternatives would work:
> >
> > the graph name need not denote the graph.
> > the graph name is not required to denote the graph.
> > RDF does not require the graph name to denote the graph.
> 
> I like the last two options.

The second option flows the best when inserted in the text IMO.

Pat, how do you find my minor tweaks above? Can I go ahead and update the document or would you like to change/improve some of them?


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Tuesday, 17 December 2013 12:41:04 UTC