- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 20:17:51 -0400
- To: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Sergey Melnik wrote: > > Brian, > > I'd just like to reiterate some of the arguments for making reification > a built-in feature (possibly as an optional layer): > > - in M&S, reified statements need to have a URI. It looks like they > should be unique, but nobody wants to deal with uniqueness, but still > some sort of URIs need to be assigned, so we end up having to deal with > different URIs denoting the same statement etc. > > - in M&S, we need a specific vocabulary to express/use reification. > Reification could be defined without relying on vocabularies. > > - as defined in M&S, reification is extremely verbose and clumsy both in > APIs and in the syntax, and very few people are using it as suggested. > However, I personally believe it is a useful feature when introduced > correctly and compactly, and it can be easily handled in APIs and > databases as an intrinsic model feature. > > Finally, (s1 p1 (s2 p2 o2)) looks nicer in the abstract syntax... I, for one, would find it easier to follow these discussions if we distinguished the "reification" that is currently defined in the M&S (which involves creating multiple triples, rather than nesting the triple that is to be reified) from alternative notations like (s1 p1 (s2 p2 o2)). I agree the latter is much nicer, but I didn't understand, when Sergey said that reification was a useful feature, that he was referring to a different way of doing it, until I got to the last bit. (Now all we need to do is be precise about what it's supposed to mean...) --Frank -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-8752
Received on Sunday, 17 June 2001 20:18:55 UTC