Re: Show me the money - (was Subjects as Literals)

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Henry Story <henry.story@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have loads and loads of code, both open source and commercial that assumes throughout that a node in a subject position is not a literal, and a node in a predicate position is a URI node.
>
> but is that really correct? Because bnodes can be names for literals, and so you really do have
> literals in subject positions.... No?
BNodes and UriRefs can be used in place of and be the same resource as
a literal. The abstract syntax forces literal in object position, but
with semantic extensions (owl:sameAs) you can express the same as you
could having Literals in subject position.

>
>
>> Of course, the "correct" thing to do is to allow all three node types in all three positions.

While allowing Literal as subjects would cause cost of adapting
existing code, allowing bnode as predicates i think would make many
algorithms computationally more expensive. I don't see how a literal
could be a property (we could syntactical allow it, but wouldn't every
use of this feature be a contradiction?)

Cheers,
reto

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 16:17:05 UTC