- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 23:22:15 -0500
- To: fmanola@mitre.org
- Cc: 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, I agree. In fact if there was some way to 'nest' assertions in RDF, it would be a vastly different and greatly improved language. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that cannot be feasibly done within the confines of the basic RDF 1 model (ie without introducing some changes in the basic triples idea, such as N3's {'contexts'} ) other than by using something like RDF containers, which have exactly the verbose and clumsy translation that Sergey doesnt like. Drew McDermott and Jon Borden and I have been trying hard to do it, but we can't see how. Pat Hayes --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Monday, 25 June 2001 10:43:32 UTC