Re: RDF and the Test of Independent Invention

On Apr 27, 2016, at 3:49 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> The test of independent invention [1] asks "If someone else had already invented your system, would theirs work with yours?"
> 
> Now imagine if someone had invented RDF (lets call it RDF-L) but with one slight difference.  You are allowed to have literals in the predicate position.

FWIW, the RDF semantics can handle this without significant change. 

> Is there a way that RDF could be made to work with RDF-L.  

Define "work with". RDF is valid RDF-L, and the RDF semantics generalizes to RDF-L without significant change, so the only hard problem is going to be getting RDF-L syntax through an RDF parser. That would require some rewriting of code, to be sure, or inventing a convention (and persuading everyone to adopt it) which disguises predicate-position literals as IRIs. The only really hard part of this is getting everyone to agree on such a convention. 

> This is more than a theoretical question, it has practical implications.  The "triple" model which ties key value pairs to a subject, could be thought of as a type of Entity Attribute Value (EAV) [2] model.  There are many examples of EAV models that allow literals in the "second" position.  JSON springs to mind.
> 
> Does RDF pass the TOII?  If not, can we work out a way to make it do so.  After some thought my current favourite idea is to make the following two equivalent:
> 
>     "predicate" <--> urn:literal:predicate

Not sure I like the *equivalence* as it seems to require all existing RDF to be rewritten using URNs, which I would ask God to forbid except it isn't going to happen so there is no need for prayer. But perhaps you don't mean this.  

Pat

> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> [1] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model

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