- From: <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>
- Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 16:25:38 +0100
- To: jborden@mediaone.net
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
(this is a reply to Jonathan's concerns about RDFCore and I thought that it would be good to cc the WG to get more feedback) Jonathan, > I think the question is whether RDF is good enough basically as is, modulo a > few syntactic touch ups and clarifications, or needs to be revised perhaps > in a substantial fashion. 'perhaps' is the right word here :-) > Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be arguing _for_ keeping RDF > basically asis, yet are a proponent of N3. True and let me try to explain why. There are a lot of 'contexts' out there ('context' in the N3 sense i.e. a set of statements). Any RDF document is such a context. The point is that such a context is identified with an URI and *could* be 'looked into' by 'evaluating' that URI. The same is true within each context. There are contexts within contexts and there is a way to 'look into' those too. Now things could be identified by their contents (literals, data: URI's, quoted RDF and so on). In the case of wtr-ing quoted RDF it is quite obvious that its statements are going in a different context (and are not asserted (as is the case for 'anonymous subgraphs' by which I mean graphs obtained by 'recursive composition' of arcs originating from anonymous nodes)) BUT it is the responsability of the RDF engine to organize all those contexts as *separate* sets of statements (which could be expressed in e.g. N3-triples syntax). So having a context-as-URI as triple term is a necessary and sufficient condition for a 'declarative approach' because 'looking into' a context is clear from the context. > I think N3 is terrific, I more than agree with that and the {} is more shorthand than anything else to "identify things by their contents". > but also think that it changes RDF in a > _substantial_ fashion. That's ok, but why don't we just admit that change is > in order, and get on with the task of creating the best RDF that can be had. > > If you are using N3 as an example of what can be done with RDF that is > confusing, rather N3 should be used as an example of how RDF should change. I refer to my above *could* and in RDF/xml it *could* be done with rdf:parsetype="log:quote" and that is a perfectly evolvable approach. -- Jos De Roo, AGFA http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/
Received on Sunday, 3 June 2001 10:26:19 UTC