Re: Primer reification section

Brian McBride wrote:

> At 08:48 19/11/2002 -0500, Frank Manola wrote:
> 
>> I'm thinking seriously about removing discussion of reification from 
>> the Primer.  Does anyone have any strong feelings about leaving it in?
> 
> 
> 
> I take it you are referring to
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-primer-20021111/#reification


Yep.


> 
> 
> The vocabulary is defined and we ought to explain somewhere what it 
> means.  Schema is currently a little bare on the matter, but I suppose 
> Danbri could fix that.


Well, the MT explains what it means.  If you think the Primer ought to 
explain all the vocabulary that exists in any of the specs -- dare I say 
it? -- the Primer is going to get bigger (there's all that seeAlso, etc. 
vocabulary in Schema to explain, for instance.


> 
> Why are you thinking of taking it out Frank?


First, it's really just a paraphrase of the MT discussion of 
reification.  It basically says "here's what you think you're doing when 
you reify an RDF statement, but it doesn't quite do what you think it 
does."  I added a paragraph that tried to say what you needed to do if 
you *really* wanted to express, say, provenance about statements (you 
need to assign URIs to statement instances, and then write statements 
describing those resources;  but you don't need the reification 
vocabulary for that), but your review indicated that you didn't seem to 
get what I was trying to say there (I suppose I could amplify on that 
some, but it really could use a concrete example from someone's actual 
usage, as Dan suggested).

Second, I'm not so sure we ought to be "priming" people to use 
reification as currently defined.

Finally, you're the only one on the WG that's really reviewed it (now 
Dan has, I suppose), and I'm hesitant to keep something this problematic 
in there without more thorough review.


> 
> I suppose the syntax document refers to it.  We'd be bound to get 
> questions.  What does this bagID stuff do?


The bagID stuff isn't explained in the Primer reification section 
anyway.  If someone would care to write that up (along with the RDF/XML 
examples of plain old reification that Dan wants) I'd include them, 
assuming we want to keep the section.


> 
> My inclination is to keep it in.  But we might want to make some 
> discouraging noises about its use.


Comment to Dan:  we can't make discouraging noises about it unless it's 
in there.  I think the WG ought to come up with some explicit wording as 
to how "discouraging" we're being about reification (e.g., deprecating 
it, following Dan's suggestion).

--Frank

PS:  My current editor's draft has reification taken out, although it 
could be put back in easily enough.

 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
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Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 17:12:29 UTC