Re: unreification

On Thu, 16 November 2000, Seth Russell wrote:

> 
> So we do
> have a dilemma: How does an application express externally (hopefully in RDF) such
> knowledge that is not explicitly in the RDF model - for example, the knowledge that a
> collection of statements hold within a certain context?  

Since RDF is declarative, it is kind of
out-of-synch with the application in the background.
Idea of atomicity is in transactions. One can rollback
atomic transactions as indivisible units. It seems
to me that 'Unreification' needs similar notion
of indivisible collection of sentences.

>If I reify each of the
> collected statements and then assert of those reifications that they belong in a
> certain context, assuming  that the reifications stand for the originals, then I have
> no way to put the reifications themselves in some other perspective (yuck).
> 

I think that each sentence to have an 'ident' is
a nice idea for declarative syntax.  And then 
reification itself is expressed by using 'ident' of
sentences and by expressing in a relationship 
(a triple or quadruple etc.).  
Then the problem mentioned above will not arise.

> I think the solution, as you have hinted, is to allow  statements themselves to
> contain idents and be objects of other statements and to have some way to communicate
> that in RDF serialization.
> 

A relationship over sentences should also be a 
sentence with an 'ident'.. and so on.
This can make semantics more explicit to internal
applications for serializations.

--ssarkar@ayushnet.com

Received on Thursday, 16 November 2000 16:46:44 UTC