Re: [OEP] Draft of a note on n-ary relations

Guus Schreiber wrote:

>> 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.
>
>Reification is the proper term. For example, it is also used in UML 
>books to describe association classes.
>I would suggest to put in a NOTE in the text to indicate that the term 
>is used in the general sense and does ot refer to RDF reification.
>
>Guus

I agree with Guus' sentiment here.  That is - "reification" is the
word that would be best understood by those from information or object 
modeling worlds.  We should, of course, clarify our use of the term
on first appearance for those who might interpret it as RDF reification.

This brings up a question though: What is the intended audience for
OEP notes?  I think we are targeting those new to the Semantic Web
and even KR.  I am expecting that audience to be dominated by domain
experts and modelers over the next few years (this seems to be 
validated by the emails I have seen on the protege-owl list).  Making 
the SW easy to use and understand for those groups is why I joined this 
WG.  So when picking terms, structure, examples and even the subject
of these notes, I would place a higher priority on the needs of these
groups than the needs of groups exemplified by say the members of 
rdf-logic.  

Is this a controversial view?

-Evan

Evan K. Wallace
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST
ewallace@nist.gov

Received on Friday, 7 May 2004 09:54:14 UTC