Re: rdfms-graph: Food for thought

At 08:16 PM 7/16/01 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 02:48  PM, Graham Klyne wrote:
>
>>  E.g. when exchanging RDF between systems (the reason for 
>> standardization), do we really want to specify that the existence of a 
>> node, without properties, is significant?  If so, we must define the 
>> significance, and that looks awkward to me.
>
>Can you explain why this seems awkward to you? It seems like a perfectly 
>reasonable thing to do to me.
>
>The alternative seems to declare that:
>
><rdf:Description rdf:about="foo" />
>
>means:
>
><foo> rdf:type rdfs:Resource .
>
>which seems even more awkward.

Actually, I think that is a relatively painless way of interpreting nodes 
without properties (one that I hadn't thought of).

The "awkwardness" to which I refer is:

(a) how is one to represent such a node in N-triples?  Currently, there's 
no obvious way (apart from what you suggest above).

(b) having selected an N-triples representation, some kind of semantics 
must be defined -- it seems rather pointless to take special steps to 
define a form and then say it adds nothing to the meaning.

That said, I think your suggestion above quite neatly addresses both 
concerns (assuming that semantics for any triple of the form:

    <foo> rdf:type <bar> .

must be defined).

#g



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Graham Klyne                    Baltimore Technologies
Strategic Research              Content Security Group
<Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>    <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
                                 <http://www.baltimore.com>
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Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2001 13:04:23 UTC