- From: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 10:11:57 -0800
- To: RDFCore WG <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
- CC: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
Brian asked me (for the Xth time, sigh) to express my concerns about reification in writing. My position remains that we need an interoperable and efficient way of doing reification. If we go for "stating" (answer "No" to Q1 in [1]), no special semantics is associated with the vocabulary rdf:Statement, rdf:subject, rdf:predicate and rdf:object. This means applications *cannot interoperate* using this vocabulary since its meaning is unspecified. Effectively, going for "stating" amounts to deprecating 4-triple reification as used today. If we go for "statement" (answer "Yes" to Q1 in [1]), we get a (rather painful, admittedly, but endorsed) way of referring to statements found on Web pages and in RDF databases, recording provenance etc. This is IMO much more concrete and useful that just providing no definition at all, although the usability of 4-triple reification still remains seriosly hampered by its verbosity. In summary, if we go for "stating" we have *no* official mechanism for reification. In this case we'd have to suggest an alternative, we cannot just wash our hands. It is an illusion that we can leave the vocabulary undefined and at the same time recommend developers to use it in a consistent way. If we go for "statement" we do have a solution, albeit a poor one. If we run out of time in finding an alternative *efficient* way of doing reification, we could of course fall back on "statement" expressed using 4 triples. In this case, we would not have achieved much since inefficiency proved to be a show stopper for using 4-triple reification in the past 3 years. Sergey [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Feb/0359.html
Received on Friday, 15 February 2002 14:40:07 UTC