- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 17:25:39 -0500
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
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 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-875
Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2002 17:12:29 UTC