Re: Reification

Jeremy--

I'm not sure what you're saying here.  Certainly people are going to 
have their own views about what sort of information to provide about 
"provenance", and hence that needs to be part of the overall 
model/ontology, as you say.  However, it's not clear to me that that 
observation means we can pass on dealing with the issue of how people do 
things like make comments about RDF statements (or groups of them), or 
do the other things for which "RDF reification" is currently cited as 
the solution.  Mind you, I don't necessarily think that "RDF 
reification", as currently defined, is the right way to do these things, 
but these seem to be basic issues in applying RDF, and I don't think we 
can punt on them.

--Frank

Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> Jos:
> 
>>I would propose to drop reification!
>>so proposal to drop its sentences in 5.5, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12 and 5.14
>>as well as "5.26 Reification Rules"
>>
> 
> Mike Dean posted an interesting provenance example to webont:
> 
>  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Dec/0102.html
> 
> 
> My take on this was not - wow a use case for reification, but ...
> 
>  This use case needs provenance. Provenance is an important part of the
> information; hence the provenance model should be an *explicit part* of the
> overall schema/ontology for the information being collected.
> 
> 
> i.e. RDF reification can be seen as a one size fits all solution for
> provenance, which history shows as having fitted hardly anyone. A better
> way, which is more in tune with the extremely open undogmatic nature of the
> semantic web, is to allow many different schemata for provenance to flourish
> and not to give preference to any one of them.
> 
> 
> 
> I think we should not *drop* reification, just not encourage it.
> We can treat reification as a purely syntactic macro, turning an rdf:ID on a
> property element into the reification quad. We could offer no model theory,
> and no primer. It is there simply as a backward compatibility thing.
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road, MS A345   Bedford, MA 01730-1420
mailto:fmanola@mitre.org       voice: 781-271-8147   FAX: 781-271-875

Received on Friday, 14 December 2001 06:53:04 UTC