Re: Confusion about Collections

Danny Ayers wrote:

> I understand Shelley's concerns, but I think it's likely that this sort of
> thing does go beyond what can reasonably be expected to fit in the current
> Primer. Perhaps next time around a 10-page Primer and a 100-page Seconder
> will be the answer ;-)


I like it!  But keeping the Seconder to 100 pages may be a problem :-)


> 
> 
>>But part of this problem about the lack of semantics
>>associated with containers and reification has always existed, it just
>>wasn't always clear.  That is, it wasn't clear how much of the intended
>>meaning of, say, an Alt could actually be controlled by RDF, and how
>>much had to be based on application writers doing appropriate things.
>>RDF never, for example, specified an API that defined operations on
>>containers, or had a way of controlling whether an application really
>>used the first member of an Alt as the default value.  So this time
>>around we're trying to be very clear about what things RDF by itself
>>guarantees, and what things are not going to be interoperable unless
>>everyone understands and implements the intended structure and behavior
>>the same way.  Of course, you can get quite a lot done with these kinds
>>of general understandings, and I expect people are successfully using
>>containers and reification based on them.  It's just that we're trying
>>to make a distinction between what RDF itself can realistically
>>guarantee, and additional characteristics of these constructs that have
>>to rely on people to "do the right thing".
>>
> 
> I suppose it's the assumption that developers will "do the right thing"
> that's been bugging me the most around the
> containers/collections/reification discussions. The contexts & graph
> 'packaging' issues are likely to be faced by a very large proportion of
> developers, and the quasi-avoidance of these issues within the spec seems to
> me to weaken the whole framework.


I agree (add to contexts and graph packaging the interaction between 
URIs as pure identifiers and URIs as retrieval addresses).  One of the 
problems here though is that these get into architecture issues that go 
beyond just RDF.


--Frank 



-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
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Received on Tuesday, 26 November 2002 08:18:13 UTC