RE: Are duplicate property/value pairs permitted for a resource?

John Cowan wrote:

> > In fact, if as John proposed, an RDF processor were able to support
> > alternative beliefs as facts,

> I made no such proposal.  I simply asked what it meant to delete
> a fact from an RDF dataset.

In order for an agent to delete some but not all "identical" assertions
(represented syntactically as facts), you must be able to effectively
maintain each (possibly contradictory) assertion in the same dataset as
separate facts.  Therefore, your proposed deletion model requires that the
RDF processor support alternative assertions (beliefs) as facts.

> > the processor would still have to internally
> > represent every fact as a reified statement.  That is, the processor
must
> > remember internally for each fact which agent asserted it.

> The second sentence does not imply the first: an RDF engine might
> remember the author (in the sense "authority" as well as "creator")
> of a fact without using RDF to represent that, though it is a
> sensible technique.

I did not say that such an RDF processor had to INTERNALLY represent reified
statements in RDF.  However, I did conclude that simply representing the
reified information internally was not good enough - users of the processor
would also need to get to the equivalent information.

Received on Monday, 12 April 1999 14:44:00 UTC