On 7/5/2010 3:40 PM, Hugh Glaser wrote: > A particular problem in this realm has been characterised as > S-P-O v. O-R-O and I suspect that this reflects a Semantic Web/Linked Data > cultural difference, <SNIP> > You see this as a problem of having a literal in the "subject" position. > I might equally decide it is a problem with having literal in the "object" > position. > Literals are literals wherever they appear - they have no deeper semantics, > and they certainly do not identify anything other than the literal that they > are, if that makes sense. >> <SNIP> > Ah, perhaps the nub. > The "subject" is no more the thing "being talked about" than the "object". > I am not asking for symmetry of the grammar, if I understand what you mean. > I am asking for the freedom to express the statements I want in the way I > want, so that I can query the way I want. > At the risk of repeating myself: > If someone wants to say "666" foo:isTheNumberOf bar:theBeast > and I have to tell them (as I do) ah, you can't say that, you need to > introduce a resource numbers:666 rdfs:label "666". ... > or bar:theBeast foo:hasNumber "666" > I actually feel pretty stupid, having told them that RDF represents > relations in a natural and basic way. > In fact, I always feel a bit embarrassed when I get to the bit in my slides > that shows there are two sorts of triples, as I have just said that the > triples are just a directed graph. Just to mischievously throw a further linguistic spanner in the works .... (maybe that's a troll alert) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language If we consider RDF as an ergative language, then the first position is necessarily an agent, and moreover, literals MUST NOT be agents http://www.w3.org/2001/01/mp23 (My first research paper was on the Basque auxiliary verb, see Carroll and Abaitua 1990) This would have interesting consequences for n-ary predicates JeremyReceived on Wednesday, 7 July 2010 02:36:59 UTC
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