Re: summary of 'a triple is not unique' and 'statements/reified' statements

Gabe Beged-Dov wrote:

> It would help if you would indicate a specific point of mine that you
> can't follow. I've tried to phrase my points in various ways and would
> be happy to learn what aspects of my phrasing are throwing things off.

Point well taken :)

> BTW, the use of the term "model" earlier in your message made me
> revisit the thread from last month and Sergey's posting [2]. He makes
> the point that there is only one model which is "the model" which
> contains all the statements/triples in existence. It corresponds to
> the set of Statements which is described in the formal model in the
> M&S.

Ok.  I'm finally coming around to understanding the M&S view that triples [s,p,o] are
unique;  and that in "the model" there exists only one of each of these things that I
see copied all over the semantic web.  I'm a little slow, hopefully I haven't bored
too many of you with my learning process.

> Sightings of these triples can occur in many places of which places on
> the web are of most interest to me. An RDF/XML document is a specific
> place that members of the universal Statements set can  either occur
> in and/or be referred to.

I like your term "sightings" .. I can even draw a picture of it ... thanks!

> The M&S provides a way to capture the fact
> that these occurences or references happened at a specific place on
> the web. The URI portion of the reified resource identifier provides
> this information.

Hmmm ... let me see if I understand you:

[s1, p1, o1]  The statement
[id1, s1, p1, p1] The reified statement

"id1' then would be the "URI portion of the reified resource".  This serial number
ties the occurrence of the statement to a specific sighting in the semantic web.

And serializing that in XML does not change it at all:

<description about="s1">
      <p1>o1</p1>
</description>

<description id="id1">
     <type>statement</type>
     <subject>s1</subject>
     <property>p1</property>
     <object>o1</object>
</description>

Did I get it right?

Of course were I to say something about [s1, p1, o1]  I  would hang my statement off
of the resource identified by "id1".  Were you also to say something about that same
statement you must needs make up a fresh id; else our utterances would collide and be
ambiguous.   But hopefully we have already reached a consensus that multiple
resources can reify the same statement.  Right?

> In addition, the M&S provides a way of tracing the syntactic context
> of a statement occurrence to a finer level by associating all the
> statement occurrences in a particular RDF/XML Description element to a
> Bag.

Ok, what do we use those for?

> The reified statement resource and the Description Bag are also used
> for other purposes than providing traceability and context. Since they
> are resources, they can be the objects of statements and this is the
> primary way that the M&S discusses their utility. I happen to think
> that it is a happy happenstance that they can also be used to provide
> other critical capabilities for document webs.

Ok i'll need to go back to your previous examples and study them in more detail.  I
didn't realize that you were using this as a way to make a more detailed description
of the syntactic structures.  If I can put this level of detail in my mentography,
then I'll probably be able to understand it.

Thanks for you patience ...
Seth Russell

Received on Thursday, 30 November 2000 10:31:23 UTC