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

On 11/24/18 6:50 AM, Hugh Glaser wrote:
 > And no, I don't want a Blank Node for [a location that has
 > labels] - the system that generates this should create a URI
 > if it doesn't already have one ;-)

I like this line of thought.  I would much rather have auto-generated 
URIs, that are predictable and distinguishable as auto-generated, than 
blank nodes.  And even better, those auto-generated URIs could be 
generated using a standard algorithm, so that all tools would generate 
them the same way.

As Aiden Hogen et all point out in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know 
About Blank Nodes": "the vast majority of blank nodes form tree 
structures", i.e., they do not contain blank node cycles.
http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/article/download/365/387

If blank node cycles were prohibited in RDF, then predictable URIs could 
be automatically generated for those blank nodes, bottom-up recursively 
based on the tree structure.  And prohibiting blank node cycles would 
not be a huge loss, because even the few cases that do use blank node 
cycles could be brought into conformance by replacing a few of the blank 
nodes with URIs, to break the cycles.

David Booth

Received on Monday, 26 November 2018 06:26:40 UTC