"reification" usage

The CIA World Factbook [1] includes various facts like

  population:  26,813,057 (2001 est.)

The CIA World Factbook in DAML [2] encodes this as

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.daml.org/2001/09/countries/fips#AF">
    <population rdf:ID="stmt1">26813057</population>
  </rdf:Description>

  <rdf:Description rdf:about="#stmt1">
    <year>2001</year>
    <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.daml.org/2001/12/factbook/factbook-ont#Estimate"/>
  </rdf:Description>

using RDF statement IDs.

Such "tagging" of statements is very important for many of
our applications, and one of the major advantages afforded
by the Semantic Web [3].  Unfortunately, reification is the
only current RDF mechanism to support this.  I hope most
parsers will (continue to) (allow users to) "short-circuit"
the implementation by attaching the statements in the
resulting model while avoiding or ignoring the extra
triples.

	Mike

[1] http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

[2] http://www.daml.org/2001/12/factbook/

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Apr/0057.html

Received on Friday, 4 April 2003 12:01:40 UTC