RE: "Including" other RDF and RDFS files

>Certainly. In fact, they are completely invisible to the RDF
>semantics. I envision RDF processors which scour the web looking for
>content relevant to their goals, plucking it out of other graphs and
>merging it together freely and drawing consequences from it. If such
>an engine simply forgot about the original graph boundaries that
>would not affect the conclusions it came to.

Hmm - ok, so the big boundary-free graph is the vanilla RDF view, but surely
most of what we might want to build on top of RDF would recognise the
boundaries. The extreme case being where provenance figures in the trust
issue, but there's also a lot to be said for using (file) graph boundaries
as way of scoping, so a grouping of statements may or may not get asserted
en masse according to some common criterion.  It looks like there are
mechanisms possible for doing this kind of thing - e.g. Seth's Quads, and
Graham Klyne's context work [1]. I'm not a logician, I wonder how from a
theoretical point of view how this might look - little closed-world islands
in a big open-world soup? - and the seeAlso/isDefinedBy/semref kind of
properties act as a bridge to another island? Does that even make sense?

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://public.research.mimesweeper.com/RDF/RDFContexts.html

Received on Sunday, 29 September 2002 05:12:47 UTC