Re: Well Behaved RDF - Taming Blank Nodes, etc.

Thank you for the filtering..
> On 13 Dec 2012, at 14:41, Lee Feigenbaum <lee@thefigtrees.net> wrote:
>
>> On 12/13/2012 2:00 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>> Another example: a picture of some celebrity standing next to a horse. I have a URI for the celebrity, but I don't have and don't need one for the horse: and if I were to invent one for each horse, then I could no longer query for retrieval of a picture of that person with "a horse", but would have to remember the URi for each of the bloody horses. But nobody gives a damn about the particular horse.
>>
>> Could you explain this more? Because I'm picturing just doing:
>>
>> SELECT ?photo {
>>   ?photo a :Photograph ;
>>        :depicts :ThePerson ;
>>        :depicts [ a :Horse ] ;
>>   .
>> }
>>
>> ...which works fine whether the horse is represented with a blank node or a URI.
>>
>> Lee

Yes! That's right. Compelling use cases for blank nodes are covered by
SPARQL. RDF triples *without blank nodes* are adequate and
understandable by everyone. Let SPARQL do the work.

The List/Collection use case is covered by Turtle where, like in any
other language, lists are primitive e.g. ( uri1 uri2 uri3 ). Let the
primitives be the canonical form and let the bnode encoding be a
historical curiosity. It was a dubious decision to encode lists in the
first place.

This leads to a half page specification for Well-Behaved RDF with
little or no ambiguity.

Ross