RE: (tentative) container model proposal

Pat Hayes wrote:
>1. The basic RDF model, if I am at last beginning to understand it, 
>is that triples represent information about things, and that this 
>information is inherently 'partial' in that it is always possible to 
>add more. Following this line of thinking, knowing that the 8th item 
>in a sequence is A, say, is partial knowledge of the sequence which 
>can stand on its own, and says what it says independently of any 
>context; and it seems quite reasonable that one could have partial 
>information about a sequence, ie knowing its 8th element is A is 
>independent of knowing its 7th element is B.
>2. If containers of one kind or another are used to encode 
>information by applications, then the position of some data element 
>in a sequence might be used to encode information that should be 
>preserved.

This makes sense to me, and removes a lot of the "awkwardness" of the
original container model (complete, consecutive numbering). I am with Pat on
this.

>3. Similarly, it might be quite handy to be able to tell when one has 
>incomplete information about the contents of a container. For 
>example, a parser might want to know if all the parts of some 
>expression are present.

For "complete" containers one could always take the daml:collection
approach, I suppose. For "incomplete", unordered containers, some type of
simple "membership" relation might also do... although now we are getting
into vocabulary issues that might not even be part of the core.

Regards,

	- Ora

--
Ora Lassila, mailto:ora.lassila@nokia.com, +1 (781) 993-4603
Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center / Boston

Received on Friday, 8 June 2001 10:16:58 UTC