Re: Can't RDF describe collection resources?

Hi Andrea,

> <http://example.org/courses/6.001>

>    s:students (
>        <http://example.org/students/Amy>
>        <http://example.org/students/Mohamed>
>        <http://example.org/students/Johann>
>    ).
> That seems what you are looking for. However, I think this introduces a collection object in triples, that may be not "handy" in queries. I'm not sure how much collections are used: i didn't see them often.

It’s almost what I’m looking for: I want to solve this problem one level higher.
You show the “students” relationship, which probably relates to the “student” relationship, and my question is how I can make such collection-instance relationships in general.

Thanks,

Ruben

> Il giorno 01/mar/2012, alle ore 07.28, Ruben Verborgh ha scritto:
> 
>> Dear Semantic Web enthousiasts,
>> 
>> Suppose we have a Web application for blogging:
>> - /posts/35 is a blog post
>> - /posts/35/comments are the comments to that post
>> - /posts/35/comments/3 is a specific comment to this post
>> 
>> In RDF, it is straightforward to make the relation between the blog post and a specific comment:
>> </posts/35> :hasComment </posts/35/comments/3>.
>> It is also easy to describe the relation between a specific comment and all comments:
>> </posts/35/comments/4> :memberOf </posts/35/comments>.
>> 
>> However, how do we indicate the relationship between the blog post and *all* comments that belong to it?
>> I.e., what is the relationship between </posts/35> and </posts/35/comments> ?
>> 
>> One could make a new predicate for that of course:
>> </posts/35/> :hasComments </posts/35/comments>.
>> But then, we still have to explain the relation between :hasComments and :hasComment; and we’d have to do that for every such plural predicate.
>> 
>> This seems to be a fundamental problem.
>> Clearly, the resource “comments on blog post 35” exists, but there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to describe it in RDF.
>> RDF lists will not be sufficient: they could indeed explain the relation between a specific comment and all comments, but not the relation between all comments and the blog post.
>> Also note that the indirect relation “_:x :hasComment _:y. _:y :memberOf _:z” is not sufficient: a blog post can have no comments, but even then it still has an (empty) comments resource.
>> 
>> Have you encountered this issue and how do you solve it?
>> 
>> Kind regards,
>> -- 
>> Ruben Verborgh
>> http://twitter.com/RubenVerborgh
>> PhD Student at Multimedia Lab – IBBT / ELIS, Ghent University, Belgium
>> 
>> Make your hypermedia API ready for intelligent agents via http://restdesc.org/.
>> 
>> 
>

Received on Thursday, 1 March 2012 09:02:09 UTC