RE: Semantic Web archaeology

The width of rail road tracks equals the width of two horse bottoms, where these horses were pulling a cart, and that determined the width of the Roman trails through Europe.

See https://www.truthorfiction.com/railwidth/ 

 

From: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> 
Sent: zaterdag 29 juni 2019 08:46
To: Graham Klyne <gk@ninebynine.org>; Patrick J Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
Cc: Antoine Zimmermann <antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr>; semantic-web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Semantic Web archaeology

 

As far as I remember the issue came up during the 1.1 revision of RDF (around 2011), too, and the decision was to keep things as they are for the fear of breaking existing code and data. There are other archeological leftovers of this kind: the fact that the URLs for rdf,  rdfs, or xsd are all awful and nobody remembers them (I know I don’t), the fact that the URL of foaf will reflect, for eternity, version 0.1, etc… I guess it all reflects the nature of all developments on the Web: it is messy, but that may be considered as the beauty of it:-) 

 

Ivan

 

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Ivan Herman 

World Wide Web Consortium 

http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

ORCID: 0000-0003-0782-2704

 

On 29 Jun 2019, 08:07 +0200, Patrick J Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us <mailto:phayes@ihmc.us> >, wrote:



Hi all.

My recollection from the first WG was that the namespaces had been defined back in 1999; that there was a strong cultural prefernce for not changing any names unless there were overwhelmingly good reasons for making the change; and that the rdf/rdfs distinction was not considered to be particularly significant. I recall this issue coming up in WG discussions early on in the WG activity, and it being dismissed as unimportant.

There was (is?) a rationale which one can appeal to, a distinction between a base logic and a (rather simple) ontology of classes. But then it is rather hard to explain why rdf:type (which is the semantic device which introduces classes) isn’t rdfs:type.

Pat




On Jun 28, 2019, at 2:42 AM, Graham Klyne <gk@ninebynine.org <mailto:gk@ninebynine.org> > wrote:

Hi Antoine,

My recollection from the time of the WG that produced the 2004 specs is that rdf:Seq and friends were already defined and used, and that we didn't want to break existing code.


Exactly.





I note that the original 1999 schema spec describes itself thus: "This specification describes how to use RDF to describe RDF vocabularies. The specification also defines a basic vocabulary for this purpose, as well as an extensibility mechanism to anticipate future additions to RDF."

And the model and syntax thus: "This document introduces a model for representing RDF metadata as well as a syntax for encoding and transporting this metadata in a manner that maximizes the interoperability of independently developed Web servers and clients."

In that context, and given that this was originally the only way defined for representing collections, it makes sense to me that the terms were considered part of the model rather than vocabulary.

I do recall from those early specs that there wasn't such a clear distinction between model and vocabulary within RDF itself - everything was encoded as XML. The notion of a formal model separate from the XML rendering didn't really solidify until the 2004 round - I recall there were some constructs from the 1999 spec that had to be dropped because they didn't really have abstract-model representation, but were grounded in XML structures. E.g. there was an "aboutEach" property that could be used to generate statements about the contents of a container: for this to work, the container was very much part of the underlying assumed model.

#g
--


On 28/06/2019 08:55, Antoine Zimmermann 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?

Nowadays, the duplication of namespaces for RDF terms seems rather silly,
confusing, and counter productive. Maybe it made sense, back in the days...


[1] morning (Stack Overflow user): Why rdf:Seq and not rdfs:Seq? Question on
Stack Overflow, 5th June 2019.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56468859/why-rdfseq-and-not-rdfsseq/56763523#56763523

 







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