Model-specific identity for anon resources, and its representation: A new issue?

In a nutshell: there is no way as far as I can tell to represent

	_:a1 <http://random.ioctl.org/#p1> _:a2 .
	_:a2 <http://random.ioctl.org/#p2> _:a1 .

in the current RDF serialisation. In other words, while we might* have
the notion that an anonymous resource has an identity wrt (the RDF graph
it is a part of), there is no way to reflect that identity except in the
most trivial acyclic cases. And not all of those, either: an acyclic
example that we can't represent is

	<http://random.ioctl.org/#feh> <http://random.ioctl.org/#p1> _:a1 .
	<http://random.ioctl.org/#yip> <http://random.ioctl.org/#p1> _:a1 .

[Initially I had thought that that was what rdf:id was for; it turns out
that it isn't]

jan

* tacitly and informally, for the moment: I've got some ideas about
formalising this (YAMT) which I won't, unfortunately, have ready by
Friday

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
The Java disclaimer: values of 'anywhere' may vary between regions.

Received on Thursday, 14 June 2001 04:58:06 UTC