RE: Provenance as a first-class citizen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Joshua Tauberer
> Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 9:47 AM
> To: 'SWIG'
> Subject: Provenance as a first-class citizen
> 
> 
> There's been some blogging on Planet RDF lately about provenance being a
> first-class citizen in RDF (as Seth Ladd put it, at
> (http://www.semergence.com/archives/2006/03/17/02/56/22/), or as John
> Barstow wrote
> (http://www.nzlinux.org.nz/blogs/2006/03/17/thinking-about-rdf-lite/),
> to be able to have provenance without reification.
> 
> I wanted to point out that this is merely an issue of serialization
> convenience, and not an issue with RDF per se, in the bigger picture.
> That is, provenance *requires* reification -- if you're going to assert
> something arbitrary about a statement, the statement *has* to be denoted
> by a Resource.  

Has anyone looked much at using anonymous predicates to deal with statements
about statements? I've played around with it some in the past -- other than
the serialization challenges it presents in some formats, it seems like a
nice solution. 

E.g:

	:Sky [rdfs:subPropertyOf :hasColor; :says :Geoff] :Blue.

This isn't really contrary to your assertion that all statements need
handles in order to talk about them, since the anonymous predicate really
becomes that. It just gives you a way to do it with two triples, rather than
three or four. It also seems to have a pretty natural reading in that the
graph ends up looking somewhat like you might diagram the actual sentence.

Thoughts?

-Geoff

Received on Friday, 17 March 2006 15:30:06 UTC