Re: Blank Nodes Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

On 11/25/2018 9:38 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> I only meant weird in the sense that someone wants to assert existence, and gets very specific about what that thing is.
> But still doesn't apparently want it to be identifiable by someone naming it later.
> It is not weird RDF, it is weird to want it :-)

Well, again, it's much like having a database tables without primary 
keys.  There are a lot of them out there.  Good data modelers turn up 
their noses, but they have their place.  I think they (i.e., blank 
nodes) are especially useful in preliminary data modeling, when you 
don't really know what the right model is anyway.  Being able to work 
with unlabeled nodes can help move the work along briskly.  There are 
some examples in my paper from Extreme Markup at

http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2007/Passin01/EML2007Passin01.html

(some people seem to have think that the point of the paper is the 
little DSL I created, but it's really about how RDF made the preliminary 
modeling much easier).

> 
> Yeah, on your last paragraph - and Pat and others have views, eg
> https://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Skolemisation

Right.

>> On 25 Nov 2018, at 14:30, Thomas Passin <tpassin@tompassin.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 11/25/2018 8:28 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
>>> :foo
>>>    :address [
>>>        :number  123;
>>>        :street  “Acacia Avenue” ]
>>> I understand that this is saying that :foo has something that is related to it by the :address property.
>>> But it is a bit weird that it then goes on to be very specific about that something.
>>
>>
>> The whole thing could also be expressed as
>>
>> :foo :address _:x1.
>> _:x1 :number 123.
>> _:x1 :street "Acacia Avenue".
>>
>> This aligns closely with what you said:
>>
>>> I see it is also saying there exists something that has two properties:
>>>   :number  123;
>>>            :street  “Acacia Avenue”
>>
>> I don't see the weirdness there...  You could in the future add something like this for clarification if you happen to learn that there is a type ex:streetAddress (or an inference system could possibly add it) -
>>
>> _:x1 rdf:type ex:streetAddress.
>>
>> To me, none of this seems weird.  There wouldn't be much point to adding an identifier to the address unless someone might want to refer to it later.  OTOH, since you don't know how someone else might want to use it later, it seems like it would be good for there to be an unambiguous way to create an identifier to support such other uses.  To me, I tend to think it would be useful to know that these identifiers had been made up for formal purposes, so maybe there could be an reserved protocol scheme for them.  Maybe like "rdf-blank:asdn-2354-8756".
>>
>>> Because of the way this is then interpreted (I think) for the two bnodes to have the same bnode identifier,
>>> it is saying that there exists something that has all those properties.
>>
>

Received on Sunday, 25 November 2018 16:27:23 UTC