- 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