Re: RDF/S entailment rules.

On May 6, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Antoine Zimmermann wrote:

> In my opinion, Semantics is missing concrete examples of entailment. There are a few examples, but only for the simple cases (and the examples should be marked with a special rendering like in Turtle).

Rendering is a good idea. 

> These examples could even be generalised to present some rules that follow from the semantics.
> 
> Actually, it could be presented by having, for each entailment regime, the following:
> - the model theoretic definitions first;
> - a sequence of ("example of a valid rule" + "concrete example of a application of the rule")

I thought of this, but the rules for simple entailment are just taking a subset (which is hardly a rule) and existential generalization, and for RDF they arent much more, but for RDFS you get a whole slew of rules. So it ends up very end-of-document weighted in any case. 

Still this might make the document more accessible, I guess. (Sigh.) 

> Perhaps even better, we could introduce at the beginning a running example which contains enough triples to apply all the example rules. As they are just informative examples, we can ommit some of the rules, such as, the ones involving rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty.

If we are going to have rules, it seems a shame to not provide a complete set, especially now Herman has done all the donkey work of establishing completeness and complexity of them. But I guess that could be an appendix.

Pat

> 
> 
> 
> AZ.
> 
> 
> 
> Le 06/05/2013 14:45, Markus Lanthaler a écrit :
>> On Monday, May 06, 2013 1:47 PM, Ivan Herman wrote:
>>> - I believe that the usefulness of the documented rule set is not only
>>> for implementers. The rule set, in my view, helps the everyday user in
>>> understanding what is going on in general, it helps to establish some
>>> sort of a mental model of what RDF(S) entailment does for you. Even if
>>> the rule set is incomplete or not 100% precise, it is still immensely
>>> useful for most of the users. Those users will certainly not read
>>> Herman's paper, they will be scared away by the abstract or the first
>>> section... and we leave them with nothing.
>> 
>> I agree with Ivan on this. A couple of years ago, when I first looked at RDF
>> Semantics, I just closed the document after scrolling a few pages down
>> because it seemed overly complex and (back then) useless. It all started
>> become much clearer once I saw the rule sets.
>> 
>> I think to most people these rules are far more accessible than all the
>> rest. So I would even go as far as proposing to include them somewhere at
>> the beginning of the document (perhaps right after Notation and terminology)
>> so that people don't get scared away before they find them (as I was back
>> then). It's completely fine if they are just informative.
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Markus
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Markus Lanthaler
>> @markuslanthaler
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Antoine Zimmermann
> ISCOD / LSTI - Institut Henri Fayol
> École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne
> 158 cours Fauriel
> 42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2
> France
> Tél:+33(0)4 77 42 66 03
> Fax:+33(0)4 77 42 66 66
> http://zimmer.aprilfoolsreview.com/
> 
> 

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Received on Monday, 6 May 2013 15:34:40 UTC