Re: Clarifications needed for the Collection construct

Dear Pat, 

sorry for the late reply. 

I understand why this new collection is included and I agree that there 
was the need to extend RDF to allow to integrate an upper bound for 
entailing. What I do not like in the found solution is that we now have 
the containers with at least a minimum of semantic for it and we have 
the collection in addition. The collection comes with no semantic and 
there are no rules given when to use a collection or a container. This will 
irritate the people that want to create some RDF and will also makes it 
more difficult to deal with it. This is contra productive! 

There could have been a property introduced (I think it would still make sense) 
that gives the length (number of members) for a container. Of course the 
processing would be different but it would also guarantee an upper bounding. 

This way the collection would not be needed any more. In case the way of 
structuring the collection has additional advantages we could think of a 
mapping between containers and collections. . we would need a container 
without any meaning and attributes for collections to represent the semantic 
for the existing container types. 


Cheers, 
Karsten 

___________________________________ 
Karsten Tolle 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "pat hayes" < phayes@ai.uwf.edu <mailto:phayes@ai.uwf.edu> > 
To: < tolle@dbis.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de <mailto:tolle@dbis.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de> > 
Cc: < www-rdf-comments@w3.org <mailto:www-rdf-comments@w3.org> > 
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 12:30 AM 
Subject: Re: Clarifications needed for the Collection construct 

> Dear Karsten' 
> 
> re. your comment at 
> 
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0328.html> 
> 
> The general point you make here can, I think, be summed up by saying 
> that RDF does not impose any well-formedness conditions on its 
> collection vocabulary, so that it is possible to write RDF graphs 
> which make no 'sense' relative to the indicated intended 
> interpretation of the collection vocabulary. This is correct, as RDF 
> provides no syntactic constraints of this kind. 
> 
> You also ask about the reason for introducing the collection 
> vocabulary. The collection vocabulary was requested by the DAML joint 
> committee and the Webont WG. The difference between the collection 
> and container vocabularies lies in the fact that it is possible to 
> write an RDF graph which entails that the number of things in a 
> collection has an upper bound, while it is not possible to do that 
> with the container vocabulary. 
> 
> We have not made any changes to the document as a result of your 
> comment. Please reply to this email, copying www-rdf-comments@w3.org <mailto:www-rdf-comments@w3.org> 
> indicating whether this decision is acceptable. 
> 
> Pat Hayes 
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