On the order of triples

Dear RDF editors,

The W3C Working Draft WD-rdf-syntax-19980216 seems undecided about the
order of the elments in the triples.

Clause 2.1. RDF Core; "Layer 0" says that the first item of each
3-tuple is an element of PropertyTypes, the second item is an element
of Nodes and the third item is either an element of Nodes or an atomic
value (an RDF string),  but explains this by saying "An RDF expression
is represented pictorially in text with nodes in '[...]'  and arcs in
'--...-->' as follows: [resource R] ---PropertyType P--> [value V]"
which changes the order.

The example is given as [http://www.w3.org/People/Lassila]
---Author--> "Ora Lassila" but the order changes again in the triple
{Author, [http://www.w3.org/People/Lassila], "Ora Lassila"}

Later, sets of triples which all refer to the same node (this time as
the second item in the triple) are introduced, but the diagram reverts
to the order: [resource R] ---PropertyType P1--> [value Vp1]

Clause 2.2. Utility Relations; "Layer 1" goes back to the previous
order in the example [http://www.w3.org/People/Lassila] ---Author-->
"Ora Lassila", but in the example of the reification the order reverts
to: [property P1] ----InstanceOf-> [RDF:Property]

I suggest that the phrase "is precisely defined as" be replaced by "is
normatively defined as", and that the examples be cast in the
normatively defined order.

Best Regards,
Roger
_____________________________________________________________________
Roger Price                    Dept of Computer Science, Umass Lowell
rprice@cs.uml.edu

Received on Sunday, 1 March 1998 20:31:04 UTC