Re: cannot work with reification proposal 1

[some change of mind...]

>DanB:
>> Can you live with the RDF spec having a (clarified version of) option 1,
>> so long as its limitations are made clear?

JosD:
> Well Dan, a fixed proposal 1, I'm quite sure, will be something
> close to proposal 2, which I thought was not an option...

OK, I said "fixed", you asked "clarified"
I can live with "clarified"
-->  it is in M&S, so say what it means and clarify the limitations

W.r.t. "filling the reification hole" I better use Pat's words:
[[[
Fifth. (Although this is a slightly different topic, it's related. )
After the recent webont hoo-ha about layering onto RDF, and after
huge battles with Jim H., I am more firmly convinced than ever that
RDF really, really needs some way to live a kind of dual life, to be
a (simple but useful) basic, vanilla notation for expressing simple
facts, sure; but also be a generic structure-encoding framework on
which to construct more complex notations, which can parse, transmit
and maybe manipulate those notations even when it cannot 'interpret'
them. And right now, RDF really cannot do both these things at once.
Reification has been used, and touted, as the way to do both at once,
but I think that this is a really bad, bad way to use reification. If
this is what it is for, then (1) it cannot also be used for what the
M&S says it is for, or any of this stuff we are talking about; and
(2) this is a really clunky, awkward, triple-hogging, ugly, wasteful
way to do that. So I would propose that we find, or invent, some
OTHER way to do that, and leave reification to do other things.

And I will suggest a way to do it in another message, just as soon as
I can get the time; it is just a proposal to adopt the 'context' idea
used in N3 and make it into a language feature. If that is out of
charter (I will argue that it should not be) then we ought to sketch
it in enough detail to see how it would work, recommend that the next
WG do something like it ASAP, and assume that they will and that will
solve that problem, and put it aside. That at least would free up
reification from this issue.
]]] -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Jan/0262.html

--
Jos De Roo, AGFA http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2002 09:25:35 UTC