DanC's RDF Issues Raises in Boston

During the Boston meeting, Dan Connolly raised a number of issues with
the current RDF specs.  This message is to make sure they are recorded
and to provide a source anchor for their inclusion in the issues list.

As I recorded them, (Dan please correct/elaborate):

  o RDF is not just a data model.  The RDF specs should define a
semantics so
    that an RDF statement on the web is interpreted as an assertion of 
    that statement such that its author would be responsible in law as
    if it had been published in, say, a newspaper.

  o There are gotchas in representing the current RDF model in a logical
    formalism.  For example, a statement is defined as triple containing
    containing at least two, possibly three resources.  Resources are
not
    reasonable things to include in a triple. [Personally, I'm not clear
why
    not, so I may have got this wrong.]

  o The current RDF terminology is inconsitent with the long established
    terminology used by logicians.  For example, what RDF'er's call a
'model'
    is called an 'abstract syntax' by logicians.  Logicians use the term
model
    but for something quite different.

  o A statement with a parseType of 'Literal' has as its object an XML
    structure, not a simple string.  For example, the first character of
the
    literal <foo>bar</foo> is not '<'.

Appologies to Dan if I have misrepresented any of these.

Brian

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 10:55:49 UTC