Re: lightweight reification (was Representing trust (and other contex t) in RDF)

"McBride, Brian" wrote:
> M&S is quite specific when it talks about reification that a statement and the resource that models it are different things.  I haven't understood why (...)

what M&S is saying is that asserting a reified statement is *not* asserting the statement itself,
which means that you can talk about a statement without "believing" it.

> (...) and I've just been wondering if one could consider statements to be resources.

I guess this is exactly what M&S intend to do by introducing reification !
And if such resources exist, they "naturaly" have the 4 properties (subject, object, predicate, type)
described in M&S.
As you say, "this seems to raise negative reactions", but also as you say "the 'overhead' of reification is more perceived than real".

As I understood it, the digest proposal intends to reify statement with an URI "containing" the 4 properties, giving the illusion that the model is much lightweight than M&S'reification. But it seems logical to express those "natural" properties of statements with a standard RDF mechanism, rather than embedding them in the URI...

That does not mean implementation must carry along 4 extra-triples for each reified statement ! I guess a smart RDF implementation would consider resources objects, triples as "special" resources and (subject, object,...) properties computed on the fly when needed.

  Pierre-Antoine


--- Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur
    Whatever is said in Latin sounds important.

Received on Friday, 26 May 2000 08:28:21 UTC