- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 07:54:20 -0400
- To: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@upclink.com>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
Aaron-- Thanks for the comments. I think you've put your finger on some key decisions we need to make about how to present this material (which I think needs some discussion), since most of the points you've identified involve deliberate choices. Detailed remarks below: Aaron Swartz wrote: > Nice work on this piece, some comments: > > On Sunday, October 14, 2001, at 06:47 PM, Frank Manola wrote: > >> “the creator of [the particular Web page we’re talking about] is “John >> Smith” “ > > > You seem to imply that the character string "John Smith" wrote this web > page. As DanC pointed out: "I don't think a 10 character string created > a web page." I don't either, but at this point, I'm trying to express things the way I think people might normally think about expressing them. I try (possibly a little indirectly) later on to clarify this point, but I'm not sure it's the right thing to start off addressing the name vs. resource issue right away (although it could be more clearly identified as an issue further along, I suspect). This is certainly one of the presentation decisions that needs to be made though. BTW: Regarding both this issue, the other issues you raise below, and any others that come up, I don't necessarily feel strongly about these things; I'll be happy to rewrite the text to present the material in whatever order the WG feels is most appropriate. Just keep in mind that there are going to be some folks who start off from a primarily Web background, and to whom metadata and descriptions are the new concepts, while there are going to be other folks who start off from a database, metadata background, and to whom Web concepts are the new things (and probably other groups as well). We need to make sure we're talking clearly to everyone. > > Also, you continually use "the" in your RDF statement examples. Since > little-to-nothing is definitive on the Semantic Web, perhaps "a" would > be more appropriate as in, "John Smith is a creator of > http://www.foobar.org/index.html". It's true that nothing is definitive on the Semantic Web, but once again I wonder whether it's appropriate to get into that right away. In this case, what the writer of the RDF probably *wants* to say is actually "the" (whether the writer is actually able to *mean* that in RDF, given your point, is another matter). This is another presentation decision. > >> the predicate is the characteristic identified by “creator” > > > As the term predicate seems to confuse a lot of people, perhaps "verb" > or "property" might be better. I'd prefer "property" (or "attribute") myself, but one of the things I'm doing here is introducing the *RDF* terminology, which seems to "officially" be "predicate". We could always change that. > >> The triples representing the above three statements would be written: >> >> http://www.foobar.org/index.html “creator” “John Smith” > > > Can we use a URI for a property, since literal properties aren't allowed > in RDF 1.0. Even better, can we use N-Triples syntax for these > statements. You correct this later, but I think it'd be better to keep > things correct from the beginning. This was another deliberately-made decision. I've seen several presentations (including yours) that use URIs for properties (and other things) from the beginning. This means introducing URIs at the beginning (which you do). That certainly is one way to approach the problem, but I thought I'd try it this way. I admit that the transition from strings to URIs creates a difficulty (which I try to address explicitly), but it seemed to me that, from the data modelling point of view, attribute-value pairs (with string names for the attributes) are very natural, and URIs are an extension, and I wanted to convey "the general idea" first, and reinforce its relationship to this common data modeling approach. This is yet another presentation decision. (I suppose I could also further clarify that what's being presented in this initial section is "not quite RDF", but that wouldn't address your basic point). > > You might also want to replace foobar.org with example.org. Good idea. > > -- > [ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ] > -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-875
Received on Monday, 15 October 2001 07:53:45 UTC