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Re: Subjects as Literals, [was Re: The Ordered List Ontology]

From: Yves Raimond <yves.raimond@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 17:50:58 +0100
Message-ID: <AANLkTimU2p38Ht9hDA7iDXDXqorYbrEKrG25y0sJKs_k@mail.gmail.com>
To: Henry Story <henry.story@gmail.com>
Cc: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, nathan@webr3.org, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Henry Story <henry.story@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1 Jul 2010, at 18:18, Yves Raimond wrote:
>
>>>
>>> In any case RDF Semantics does, I believe,
>>> allow literals in subject position. It is just that many many syntaxes
>>> don't allow that to be expressed,
>>
>>
>> It doesn't seem to be allowed in the RDF semantics:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Literals
>>
>> "A literal may be the object of an RDF statement, but not the subject
>> or the predicate."
>
> Yes, but a bnode or a URI can refer to a literal. So if those can refer to a literal,
> then instead of writing
>
> [1] _:n1 owl:sameAs "hello";
>     numLetters 5 .
>
> Why not also allow one to write
>
> [2] "hello" numLetters 5.
>
> ?
>
> That is what I meant.
>
> In any case one can always map [2] to [1], so I am not sure
> the costs of allowing [2] need be that high. Every current implementation
> could just parse [2] and write it out as [1].
>
> No?
>
> It just seems that [2] is a more concise way of writing things, and
> it is conceptually cleaner.

I definitely agree...

For my thesis work, I had to store quite a lot of signal processing
computations in RDF, and had to hack a few triple stores (mainly SWI's
one) to handle literals as subjects. I used a similar hack to do that,
it was very easy to implement...

y
Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 16:51:35 UTC

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