- From: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>
- Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:21:09 -0700
- To: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Everyone, I'd appreciate people's thoughts on a certain abstract ontology design issue: What are the semantic ramifications of using an integer as a predicate in an assertion? (I ask this question in abstract, independent of RDF's limitations.) Let me explain: JavaScript is a very dynamic language in which almost everything eventually ends up as an associative map. Even JavaScript arrays are sugar-coated associative maps, with each key of the map being the index. RDF literals have many limitations, but let's ignore them for the moment and assume that I have a URI that represents the integer 0. (I use OWL or whatever to say that 0 is the same as the typed literal "0"^^xsd:Integer, maybe.) Assume further that I'm creating my own array type. The question becomes: would I want to use the integer 0 as a property to my array resource? (That is, the triple: {my:Array, integer 0, first array element}? Or would I be better off creating a new namespace just for indexes? (The latter is similar to what rdf:Seq does, with rdf:_1 being a resource distinct from the integer 1.) In short: what are the semantic ramifications of using an integer as a predicate in an assertion? Does that reflect what is happening semantically when an element is a member of an array? Garret
Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2007 18:21:37 UTC