- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 09:20:35 -0600
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
Pat Hayes wrote: > > > > > > True, and I wish it did address reification. For reasons that are > >> still opaque to me, the treatment of reification that I originally > >> offered was rejected by the WG, but until someone can tell me *what* > >> was wrong with it, I am somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. > > > >I have told you several times now (including ftf on the > >walk to the bar in California), but I guess I'll say it once more: > > You told me that I had it wrong, but you didn't tell me what was right :-) > > >In your model theory, the subject of the sentence > >"Mary hit the ball" is a word starting with the letter "M". > >In RDF-as-deployed, the subject of that sentence is a girl. > > > >Slightly more precisely, given > > <Mary> <hit> <aBall>. > >its reified form includes > > _:statement rdf:subject <Mary>. > > > >note that the reified form doesn't quote <Mary>. > > Well, OK, but that is completely at odds with everything the M&S says > about reification. Yes, I agree, it's horribly botched. I'm not arguing that it *should* be this way; only observing that it has been widely interpreted this way. Maybe we can convince the implementors that have implemented it this way that it's a bug. But it's a widely deployed bug. Perhaps not a lot of applications depend on this behaviour, and it's feasible to "fix" the bug; i.e. redeploy the implementations. > A reified statement is supposed to be a > reification *of a statement*, ie of a triple, right? Well, yes, in the applications I want to build, that's the sort of reification that would be useful. > In your account > here, the reification of the triple > > <mary> <hit> <ball> . > > has exactly the same content and meaning as the original triple. If > this is the case, what is the point of using reification at all? I have no idea why anybody would want this form of reification. > All > one has done is to provide another way to write the same thing. > > [Later. Oh, I see what the answer might be: same proposition, but not > same assertion. Reification here isn't thought of as a metalevel > assertion, but rather as a way of sidestepping assertion. The point > being that the unreified triple is asserted in any graph in which it > occurs, but the reification is not asserted. Is that the idea?] Not for me. > Tell you what, rather than get into an immediate debate about this, I > will try to write a short summary of various views on what > reification means, which that will give us something to refer to. (I > now have four of them. ) I was planning to do this last week but got > zapped. > > Pat -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2001 10:20:21 UTC