Re: PRIMER: draft data model section

Oops!  Forgot something.

Pat Hayes wrote:
> >
> > The RDF model uses a particular terminology for talking about the
> > various parts of statements.  Specifically, the thing the statement
> > is about (the resource, the Web page in this example) is called the
> > subject.  The attribute or characteristic of the subject that the
> > statement specifies
> 
> This is getting rather awkward. We now have two long words 'attribute'
> and 'characteristic' which both seem to me to be less clear in meaning
> than the real word, which is 'property' . Why not just call them
> properties up front, and say that RDF assumes that things have
> properties which have values, and give some examples, before getting
> into RDF itself? I don't think that people will find that hard to
> follow, and it will set them thinking along the right lines before
> they have to wrestle with how to torture English syntax into
> RDF-triple format.
> 
> >  (creator or date-created in this case) is called the predicate
> > (borrowing a term from mathematical logic)
> 
> What?? I thought it was called a "property". It's not a predicate in
> the math-logic sense: it is a binary relation.  Predicates don't have
> values. I would much prefer to stick to 'property', but if we must use
> logical terminology then call it a relation, not a predicate. (The
> term 'p' in the s-p-o terminology is from simple linguistics, not from
> mathematical logic.)

I called it a "predicate" because that's the term used in the M&S.  If
we've changed it officially, I must have missed it (where would this be
documented?).  Mind you, I like "property" better and, if that's the
official term, it simplifies things all around because, as you say, I
can use it from the beginning without any synonyms.  As it was, I felt
that "predicate" needed some lead-in.

--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 Tuesday, 16 October 2001 13:47:18 UTC