Putting context in RDF serialization

Applications of the semantic web are going to be aggregating
different sources of RDF.  Categorizing information (time,
geography, trust, topic etc. ) will also be collected in the
process of reading RDF statements. Our applications will
need some method to easily express this type of information
*in RDF*.   I suppose that there are methods to do this
using bag containers, but they are cumbersome.  However, RDF
has already defined the perfect container  for our purpose
... the RDF element itself.   So I propose the following
extension to RDF XML serialization for contexts (graphs,
models, microtheoroies, sources, settings, frameworks,
situations .......):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  <RDF
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:s="http://description.org/schema/"
    context="contextUri1"
    context="contextUri2"
   >
    <Description about="http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila">
      <s:Creator>Ora Lassila</s:Creator>
    </Description>
  </RDF>

This would generate the following triples:

[contextUri1] ---context--->[id1,
http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila , s:Creator, "Ora Lassila"]
[contextUri2] ---context--->[id1,
http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila , s:Creator, "Ora Lassila"]

Where [id1, http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila , s:Creator, "Ora
Lassila"] is just a shorthand notation for the reification
quad:

[ id1, rdf:type, statement]
[ id1, rdf:subject, http://www.w3.org/Home/Lassila]
[ id1, rdf:predicate, s:Creator]
[ id1, rdf:object, "Ora Lassila"]

Seth Russell

Received on Friday, 15 December 2000 12:28:00 UTC