- From: Graham Klyne <GK-lists@ninebynine.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:31:27 +0000
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- CC: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de>, Dieter Fensel <dieter.fensel@sti2.at>, Enrico Franconi <franconi@inf.unibz.it>, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, Mark Wallace <mwallace@modusoperandi.com>, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Reto Bachmann-Gmuer <reto.bachmann@trialox.org>, Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com>, Ivan Shmakov <ivan@main.uusia.org>, "<semantic-web@w3.org>" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Pat Hayes wrote: > OK, let me change the scenario a little. Suppose that ALL the actual RDF is skolemized. There is *no such thing* as unSkolemized RDF with blank nodes in it. The "blank node ids" are purely in the GUI editor, generated for you to see on the screen: they are just a graphic blurring device to obscure these ugly skolemURIs from your tender human sight. Now, when you compose and then publish the RDF, it has URIs in it (even if you can't see them, they are there). When you read it back in and edit it, it still has those skolemized URIs in it. (When you look at it, you might see different bnodeIDs, of course, just like with SPARQL results, since these ids are generated by your GUI.) When you re-publish it, it still has the URIs it always had in it (unless you have edited them). This is close to what I'd do today, but... > Does this work OK? I know that you geeks who hand-edit using ed or bbedit some other Neanderthal text editor might have to actually look at these URIs, but then surely you are used to seeing URIs in RDF by now, aren't you? ... I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of being able to manipulate the system with "Neanderthal" machinery. One of the reasons that many Internet protocols succeeded where more complex variants did not is because they can be debugged with a simple Telnet client, and programmed with simple text manipulation libraries. In my experience, GUIs have a way of being unreliable, cumbersome and/or expensive. Even with bNodes, RDF/XML sort of fails on this score already, but I think that *requiring* full URIs to appear for every node in a document would incur considerable additional burden. I *could* imagine deprecating bNode IDs: if you want to cross reference within a document, use a full locally-generated URI, typically expressed relative to the document URI: I don't think that would be too onerous. Then scoping concerns are eliminated, and what remains of what we currently see as bNodes could be handled though implicit Skolemization. #g --
Received on Friday, 25 March 2011 15:47:11 UTC