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

Aaron Swartz wrote:
> 
> On Thursday, June 14, 2001, at 06:31  AM,
> jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com wrote:
> 
> > We can imagine that anounymous terms are identified 'by their content'
> 
> I certainly hope not. At least, this is not the way I use
> anonymous terms. I imagine anonymous terms being equivalent to
> stating "a term with these properties" not "all terms with these
> properties". If two people in a room call out that they're
> thinking of something gray...
> 
>         :Person1 :thinkingOf [ :color :Gray ] .
>         :Person2 :thinkingOf [ :color :Gray ] .
> 
> ... we cannot conclude that they are both thinking of elephants,
> or at least of the same thing. One may be thinking of the New
> York Times and the other of his office building.
> 
> I think you are smushing prematurely.
> 
> And the current XML still doesn't have a way to say:
> 
>         _:a :property _:b .
>         _:b :property _:a .
> 
> nor
> 
>         :x :property _:a .
>         :y :property _:a .
> 
> If anonymous nodes are part of the abstract syntax (which we
> seem to have implicitly agreed upon through our acceptance on
> N-Triples), then this is an issue.


I don't agree that anonymous nodes should be part of the abstract
syntax, and would suggest to consider this issue when cleaning up the
model. I'm convinced that (sufficiently) uniquely generated resources
serve the purpose better than "anonymous" resources (for instance, in
the example above you really might want to know whether Person1 and
Person2 are referring to the same unknown gray thing). Explicit
existentially qualified variables are IMO out of scope of our work.

Sergey

Received on Friday, 15 June 2001 18:44:50 UTC