- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 08:08:31 +0100
- To: Natasha Noy <noy@SMI.Stanford.EDU>
- Cc: swbp <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>, Alan Rector <rector@cs.man.ac.uk>
Natasha Noy wrote: > > > People seem to have agreed that doing a pattern on n-ary (reified) > relations would be a useful thing to have. Alan Rector and I actually > had a chance to work it out and you can see the first draft of our > effort at > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2004May/att-0003/n- > aryRelations.html > > It's nowhere near as complicated or as controversial (we hope) as the > Classes as Values one. In fact, it's rather simple, almost too simple > to be a pattern. Simple design patterns are better than complicated ones. I think this looks useful. > On the other hand, it seems to be on a topic that many > newcomers to OWL have questions on. > > As usual, please feel free to poke holes in it and all feedback is > welcome. > Two comments: 1) I think it would be worth showing this design pattern also just with RDFS, and hence broadening the scope of this note to [[ In OWL *and RDF*, a property is a binary relation: it links two individuals or an individual and a value. How do we represent relations among more than two individuals? ]] (basically this would use global range and domain constraints to achieve some of the effect) 2) I winced somewhat at the use of the words "reify" and "reified" RDF reification is, to me at least, a bit of a mess, and use of these words will make the RDF literate reader think of RDF reification. I realise that the use in this note is appropriate, and in some ways not actually different from RDF reification of statements. However, I think there is potential for confusion "What has all this got to do with reification?" - for me the best fix would be to use a different term in this note. > Thanks in advance, > > Natasha and Alan > Jeremy
Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 03:09:15 UTC