Re: On lists, Lists and (...) - [was] defining the semantics of lists

Hi Thomas,

thanks for sparking and summarising the discussion on RDF lists, which I 
think are an underestimated feature of RDF, even in their current form.

I think RDF lists are indeed useful, having used RDF lists in my work to 
describe and execute workflows in Linked Data [W], because at some point 
those workflows need to terminate and for that, the closedness of the 
list was exactly what I needed. FWIW, in OWL-S, they followed a similar 
path, but they defined an equivalent copy of the RDF list vocabulary for 
compatibility with OWL-DL [0], which as you said, only permits the use 
of the RDF list vocabulary in T-Box statements.

As part of my toying around with lists, I built a vocabulary [1] and 
some rules [2] to deduce facts like list membership (eg. if you imagine 
a tree, where each node has an RDF list with its children, you may also 
be interested in a hasChild relation between the node and each child, 
like looking at a RDF List as an RDF Container), similar to what CWM and 
Jena do for lists with custom properties and built-in code [3,4].

So, coming back to your question:

> The situation surely could be improved, but is it worth the effort?

My answer would be (looking at the interest manifested in this mailing 
list discussion, the references you cited and those I added here):

Yes!

And I would hope for better tool support.

Cheers,

Tobias

PS: FWIW, another use of RDF lists is in the W3C WG Note on HTTP in RDF, 
see [5].

[W] Käfer and Harth: Specifying, Monitoring, and Executing Workflows in 
Linked Data Environments. ISWC 2018
[0] https://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/#AppendixB
[1] http://purl.org/list/vocab
[2] http://purl.org/list/semantics
[3] https://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/CwmBuiltins (see the properties 
prefixed with list: )
[4] 
https://jena.apache.org/documentation/query/library-propfunc.html#property-function-library
[5] https://www.w3.org/TR/HTTP-in-RDF10/#MessageClassExamples

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2020 11:51:15 UTC