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Re: An RDF Reification Syntax Idea

From: Pierre-Antoine Champin <swlists-040405@champin.net>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:05:17 +0100
Message-ID: <45C0BE3D.304@champin.net>
To: Adam <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
CC: semantic-web@w3.org

Adam a écrit :
> In reifying statements from other sources or in a document discussing
> its own statements, it appears that we have two alternatives.  First, we
> can use the syntax where the statement is an element and contains
> subject, predicate and object elements. This leads to replication, where
> an author must repeat the statements in this context. The second
> approach is to consider them to be a subgraph literal which again
> removes them from their original context or otherwise duplicates them.
> 
> I would like to propose a third alternative to the discussion while the
> topics of reification and provenance in RDF are being considered. This
> idea uses the relationship between RDF and N3: that any RDF-based
> document can be represented uniquely as a sequence of triples.

I do not quite agree: any RDF-based document can be represented uniquely
as a *set* of triples. The order of the triples is not relevant.

Of course, one may define a canonical order (the most obvious being
alphabetically sorting the triples), but that would make it costly to
compute for any document that is not represented in that canonical form.

Furthermore, I expect that some RDF "resources" would not be
"documents", where one can query the triple but not get an exhaustive
list of them.

  Pierre-Antoine
Received on Wednesday, 31 January 2007 16:05:31 UTC

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