Re: Subjects as Literals

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 4:20 AM, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> In fact, a question I would like to ask, but suspect that noone who can
> answer it is still reading this thread ( :-) ):
> For those who implement RDF stores, do you have to do something special to
> reject RDF that has literals as subject?

I think more important than storing RDF is storing the expressed
content. For the content expressed with RDF and OWL, resources can
have 0 to n names and 0 or 1 literal value. When the content has to be
represented as RDF triples owl:sameAs statements are created for the
multiple names as well as possibly a bnode to prevent the literal
being in subject position. As by using OWL this limitation of the RDF
Abstract Syntax does not limit the expressiveness I see no need to
change anything.

Serialization formats could support

"Jo" :nameOf :Jo

as a shortcut for

[ owl:sameAs "Jo"; :nameOf :Jo]

and a store could (internally) store the latter as

"Jo" :nameOf :Jo

for compactness and efficiency.

Reto