- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 13:46:41 -0400
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
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