Re: Lists vs collections. (was: Re: response to Brian's rdfs review)

I've seen a couple of comments to the effect that we use "Collection" 
because DAML did.  Keep in mind that isn't the whole story.  What DAML 
did (and what we thought we were doing) was define a construct that at 
the (RDF/XML) syntax level was a "collection", and in particular was 
supposed to be a "closed collection".  We subsequently decided (I think) 
that it couldn't really accomplish the "closed" part (at least not at 
the RDF level), but that we needed to leave it in RDF so that RDF 
parsers would at least generate the proper underlying data structure 
(the List) for DAML/OWL to use.  The List is just the RDF graph 
structure that gets generated to represent the collection.  We didn't 
explicitly add "Collection" in order to directly represent lists (if 
we'd wanted to directly represent lists, we'd presumably have called it 
"List").  At least, that's the story *I* remember.

--Frank

Received on Sunday, 10 November 2002 18:13:11 UTC