Re: Blank nodes must DIE! [ was Re: Blank nodes semantics - existential variables?]

On 7/8/2020 10:25 PM, Patrick J Hayes wrote:
>> On Jul 8, 2020, at 10:54 AM, Thomas Passin <tpassin@tompassin.net> wrote:
>>   Is that literal value itself the "same" for both?  In some software it might be - if it's been memoized, for example - but that's normally an implementation detail, not something fundamental.

> Sigh. RDF is not software. It is a data representation language. Think of it as JSON with semantics.

Yes, I do know that and I'm not trying to say differently.  I said the 
same in another post.  I've only trying to get at the notion that 
literal values rarely have much significance beyond their actual values. 
  The actual values, those denoted by their literal strings, often have 
have a value that is rather arbitrary - by this I mean that if the value 
related to a node has come from a measurement (for example), that 
measurement may have an accidental or random component - for example, it 
may depend of the precision of a measuring instrument or the 
instantaneous amount of electronic noise, or some kind of quantization. 
So a coincidence of the literal strings related to different nodes may 
often have very little significance beyond the actual denoted value itself.

I'm going to back out of this discussion now because I seem to have 
confused things, not what I intended at all.

Maybe the thread could be brought back to one discussion group, since 
some of it seems to have gotten cross-posted to two at least.

TomP

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2020 02:47:55 UTC