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Re: A certain difficulty

From: Guha <guha@epinions-inc.com>
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 10:16:44 -0800
Message-ID: <38C1530C.CA803317@epinions-inc.com>
To: Stefan Haustein <stefan.haustein@trantor.de>
CC: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Bill dehOra <Wdehora@cromwellmedia.co.uk>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
The semantics of Class are different in RDFS and  OO.

In your proposal, we are unlikely to have a single Class
"Person". We will probably have a thousand or more different
versions of "Person", each with its own set of properties.

I think this will be an impediment ...

guha


Stefan Haustein wrote:

> Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >
> > No, there *is* something fundamentally different between most distributed OO
> > systems and frame systems and RDF.  In a frma system, fundamentally, the
> > designer of an object class defines the set of properties an object may
> > "have".  This doesn't scale, as it doesn't allow anyone to say anything
> > about anything: you can only say what the class designer said you could say,
> > and in some syetms you can only say it if you have write access to the
> > object. The RDF model in which properties are essentailly first class
> > objects independent of classes (though constrains can later be expressed) is
> > fundamentally more weblike, and therefore scalable.
>
> I claim that you still could say anything about anything if
> properties were local to classes in RDF: An instance
> can have several different types in RDF. You would just need
> to design a custom class containing the properties you wish,
> and add the new class to the types of the instance you
> describe.

...
Received on Saturday, 4 March 2000 13:17:33 UTC

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