Re: RDF Scoping Mechanism

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
> Pat Hayes wrote:
>>
>> It wouldn't take very much to make into full first-order logic: all it
>> needs is a scoping mechanism (think graph literals in N3 or named graphs, or
>> my 'surfaces' idea from the Blogic talk) and negation. Mind you, that
>> scoping mechanism would drive a truck through triple-store-based
>> implementations, I suspect. Back to tree structures and Sexpressions, no
>> doubt :-)
>
> Obvious question, regardless of implementations, is there any chance of
> getting that scoping mechanism in to RDF through W3C to rec?

Yes. "Named graphs" were one of the recommendations of the RDF Next
Steps workshop. This was one of the few issues without a lot of
controversy.

> Any rough ideas how long that process may take? (I'm assuming the RDF
> Semantics are bug-less and this would just be an addition).

Standards processes take some time. You have a lot of people involved,
and the standard can't emerge until they've all reached an agreement
through compromise, and then they have to document it all. It wouldn't
start until the end of the year (I believe the suggestion is for it to
start in January, if it happens). The charter typically gives a
timeframe, which is determined based on the amount of work that is
expected. Then there can be extensions if they can't finish in time.
If I had to make a completely uninformed, wild guess, I'd suggest
18-24 months. So some time early 2013. But that could be completely
wrong (I don't have a lot of W3C working group experience).

> My logic here is that if other serializations or even something N3-like were
> to go through standardization, then work would probably have to start on
> getting said scoping mech in to RDF sooner rather than later.

No, it could happen together.

Another recommendation of the RDF Next Steps workshop was to
standardize Turtle. I thought it would be N3, but everyone was looking
at Turtle instead. That's OK - they're pretty close. One of the things
to come up was to evolve Turtle before it is standardized to
incorporate named graphs with scope. So if the workshop proposals are
followed, the next version of RDF would have named graphs, AND a new
file format for representing triples, optionally in a named graph.

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Received on Friday, 2 July 2010 17:56:39 UTC