RE: Comments on the new RDF Test Cases draft

At 09:58 22/05/2002 -0400, Massimo Marchiori wrote:
[...]

>So bare-bones, suppose an RDF parser digests one of the test cases, and 
>produces
>all the triples we expect to (as per the "minimal interpretation" currently
>understood in the Test Cases), plus the following triple:
>[rdf:type] [rdf:type] [rdf:Property] .
>Is it compliant to RDF, or not?

No.

>The set of triples that have been produced are virtually indistinguishable
>according to the Model Theory (which is the *meaning* of a graph, 
>independently
>of its syntax).
>So, if we limit ourselves to the current Test Cases interpretation, we are
>relying on the syntactical structure rather than on the semantical one,
>which is something I find very unelegant, and to some extent even 
>logically broken.
>Said this, yes, this is opinionable and no one (included me) will scream loud
>if the "syntactical equivalence" is used rather than the semantical one.
>However, I do think it's more elegant to go the semantic way, and can't really
>see many advantages to go for the syntactic way.

We are close to last call now, and have picked our course.  The parser test 
cases define the transformation from RDF/XML to an equivalent graph 
described in n-triples, where equivalence is a syntactic equivalence.  That 
is unlikely to change unless we see some specific problems with this 
approach.  I take from what you write above, that whilst you prefer tests 
based on semantic equivalence, you are willing to accept test cases based 
on syntactic equivalence.

Brian

Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 10:57:44 UTC