Re: Outcomes from Jan 2 telecon

Thanks for adding this, Dave.

Dave Reynolds wrote:
> Then there was discussion on which, if any, of those three should go in 
> the core. Gerd suggested that rather than have all three in the core we 
> pick one based on use cases, I thought that received fairly broad 
> agreement.

That wasn't my impression.  The core should, from a design 
perspective, remain a core. The agreement I heard was that we should 
attempt to find a way to translate between the different approaches. 
If they are interchangeable, then it makes sense to pick one.

> 
> [I was going to insert an appeal to the charter in here but the charter 
> isn't helpful. It says:
> 
>    """In order to allow interoperability with RDF and object-oriented 
> systems, the syntax must support named arguments (also called "role" or 
> "slot" names), allowing n-ary facts, rules, and queries to be provided 
> through property/value interfaces."""
> 
> Justifying slotted syntax based on RDF makes little sense to me but 
> presumably would correspond to the relational semantics, whereas 
> interoperability with object-oriented systems would presumably be better 
> served by one of the other semantics.]

I don't know where that requirement came from, I found it odd when I 
first read it, too, but note that RDF does NOT have a relational 
semantics. I suspect that this requirement has to do with the fact 
that in order to represent relational n-tuples in RDF you must either 
use lists OR make a node that "represents the tuple" with (named) 
edges that point to the elements (arguments) of the tuple.  The latter 
approach corresponds to the idea of slotted/keyword syntax, and I 
assume this is also what was meant by "object oriented systems" here - 
that an object corresponds to an n-tuple with slot names corresponding 
to argument positions.  Obviously using RDF Lists corresponds to a 
positional syntax.

A disconnect between the relational view and this tuple-as-object view 
is identity.  In the relational semantics, the same ordered tuple is a 
single element, even if you try to repeat it.  In the tuple-as-object 
view, two objects with the same arguments (ie all the same slot-value 
pairs) are not necessarily the same.  I think Michael's forthcoming 
document will discuss this.

There is also a disconnect in the other direction, however, that has 
been festering in my mind.  I think most of us who use RDF have been 
thinking that RIF will treat RDF triples as ordered binary predicates, 
e.g. the triple Chris brotherof darren would be 
brotherOf(Chris,Darren) in RIF.  This requirement with its 
"compatibility with RDF" phrasing seems to suggest that someone thinks 
there should be some special set of RDF nodes that will be treated as 
tuples, so that brotherOf(Chris, Darren) would actually be represented 
in RDF as something like:

A Arg1 Chris
A Arg2 Darren
A type brotherOf

Hmmmm...

-Chris

> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Christopher A. Welty                    IBM Watson Research Center
+1.914.784.7055                             19 Skyline Dr.
cawelty@gmail.com                           Hawthorne, NY 10532
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty

Received on Wednesday, 3 January 2007 12:49:31 UTC