Re: Semantic Web archaeology

On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 09:55:50 +0200, Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr> wrote:
> Recently on Stack Overflow, there was a question asking "Why rdf:Seq and 
> not rdfs:Seq?" [1]. I tried to answer the best I could, by digging in 
> the old RDF mailing lists, but I am still puzzled about how some terms 
> ended up in the rdf: namespace rather than rdfs: (and vice versa). Can 
> someone involved in the early days of RDF enlighten us about this?

Not involved at time, but rdfs: is all about the schema, *describing*
properties and types. It is a mini-ontology-language.  rdf: is about
using the language.

Here is how rdf was introduced in 1999
https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/

..which links to rdfs draft https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-schema/
co-developed separately, but rdfs took significantly more time to
formalize.

Dan Brickley may be able to fill me in, but I believe it was the
intention a that using rdfs was optional? (you could mint
http://example.com/vocab#property5 and just have a HTML page about it)

rdf:Seq is a data construct, so part of rdf like Bag and List 
(BTW, describing use of rdf:Seq in rdfs is difficult, as you cannot say
what elements are expected in the seq.)

So you could say rdfs: is at "meta" level, describing what *could* be
used in RDF instances (or more like, what do the terms mean), while rdf:
is a practitioner level, properties and types you may use in regular RDF
"instance-level" documents.


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes
The University of Manchester 🐝
https://www.esciencelab.org.uk/
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718

Received on Friday, 28 June 2019 08:50:34 UTC