Containers and the RDF Model (A3)

Regarding http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001May/0084.html
RDFCore WG 2001-05-18 Teleconference Agenda action review A3:

	A3: Ora Lassilla/ send analysis (#rdf-container-syntax-ambiguity and
	    Dan Brickley  #rdf-containers-syntax-vs-schema)to rdfcore-wg list


I wrote up some *brief* notes on my Hong Kong discussion w/ Ora last week,
sent them to Ora and the www-archive list archiver rather than this list.
I wouldn't call this a full analysis of the problem w/ the container
model, but the note is at:

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2001May/0000.html

Excerpted conclusion:

[[
Two problems are posed by this formulation:

 - it suggests that any RDF model which describes some container is in
possession of a complete description of that container. The phrase "the
elements of Ord must be used in sequence starting with RDF:_1" appears to
rule out the use of the formal RDF container model for descriptions where
only partial information is available. Use case: an rdf:Seq representing
the (incompletely represented) houses in a street.

 - it interacts with the syntactic sugar provided by the <rdf:li> XML
syntax machinery: RDF parsers typically assume that containers encoded
using this construct contain complete descriptions of some Bag, Seq or
Alt. But there is no syntax-level support for making this clear.

This situation is in tension with a broad design goal of RDF: to allow Web
services to aggregate and process partial descriptions.
]]

We (Ora and I) do not yet make any suggestions as to how to deal with
this problem.

Dan

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 08:02:23 UTC