Re: Interpretation of RDF reification

* McBride, Brian
>
> There are those who regard reification with some trepidation; there  
> are
> no doubt gremlins lurking in its inner workings.

No doubt. :)

> The clarification that RDFCore made was between statements and  
> statings.
> There is a test case somewhere - I don't have the reference to hand.
>
> If x is, as you say a reification of (s, p, o) for some s, p, and o.
>
> And y is also a reification of (s, p, o), then is x necessarily the  
> same
> thing as y, e.g. does (x, wasStatedIn, foo) entail (imply) (y,
> wasStatedIn, foo)
>
> The answer is no.  X represents the stating of the statement, or the
> occurrence of the statement, not the statement itself.

Ah, I see. This was very clear. So X represents a stating, and there  
can be many statings of the same statement, in the sense that I could  
state it today, and you may have stated it yesterday, giving us two  
statings of one statement?

> What do you intend to do with this "marriage relationship"?  To
> understand your use case, I'd like to know what sort of statements  
> you'd
> like to make about the relatioship.

Basically, the use case is to be able to state marriages as a single  
triple (for convenience, say), while still retaining the ability to  
talk about the marriage, and retaining the connection between the  
triple and the marriage node.

(The *real* use case is that we are trying to map reification in  
Topic Maps into RDF as part of the RDFTM work. Reification in Topic  
Maps is very much the marriage, rather than a statement about it, or  
even a stating.)

Anyway, thanks a lot for this. It was very helpful.

--
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian               http://www.ontopia.net
+47 98 21 55 50                             http://www.garshol.priv.no

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 21:04:42 UTC