Re: is this valid to make a named graph in RDFa?

On Thursday 06 March 2008 3:18, Story Henry wrote:
> If you want to make statements as complex as that then you should use  
> N3. It is perhaps not a bad thing that the more widespread RDF  
> serialisations do not make it easy to make statements about  
> statements. Life is already complicated enough with getting people to  
> express what they believe. Having people start making statements about  
> what they believe other people believe, or statements about what they  
> believe other people should assume other people believe, would really  
> make things a lot more complicated, and not necessarily any better.

Well - respectfully, I disagree with that statement ;-)

I think progress comes thru discussion and its very hard to have a discussion 
if you can't refer to something someone said...if RDF won't make that easy, 
then we have to keep the 'real' stuff in English, or whatever language we're 
talking in.  

I guess I have a fundamentally different view of the usefulness of RDF - 
making everything susceptable to machine logic seems to me premature, but 
making tools to help humans apply structure and logic to information seems 
very apt.  So I'm looking at RDF apps more as manually operated tools than as 
complete control systems.

> 
> But if you really need to play with that use N3. The best is to try to  
> keep things as simple as possible.

Hm - I might use N3 on the back end eventually, right now its all mysql and 
perl - but the presentation end is what I'm working on currently, and that 
has to be something browser-parsable.  

Anyway, thanks for the perspective!

--Golda

ps I can't help it - another riff:  I think assuming that definitions are 
factual rather than personal representations of reality is one of the reasons 
that there has been some problems getting domain ontologies created.  I 
remember reading a quote from a US Senator, that whoever is in charge of the 
definitions wins the argument.  Rules and definitions beg for discussion in 
any field that is under 100 years old...

Received on Thursday, 6 March 2008 19:46:23 UTC