Re: Analysis of Anon Resources (long)

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, McBride, Brian wrote:

> Some possible solutions
> 
>   o  All members of the set R must be given a URI by an
>      application or parser
> 
>   o  Remove anonymous resources from the serialization
>      - they were a mistake
> 
>   o  Invent a new class of URI, not URL's, not URN's
>      but a scoped resource name.
> 
>   o  Some members of the set R do not have a URI.

I've put a similar discussion up at

	http://tribble.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~cmjg/rdf/

At the moment, that page is a mishmash of design and implementation
issues. The solution I like the most can be briefly described as:

	"Anonymous resources" have a per-model identity; they may
	have URIs which we don't know yet. They gain an external
	identity through the process of serialisation; that "identity"
	only lasts for the lifetime of the serialisation.

	Internally, anonymous resources can be located via the
	relationships they partake in in an RDF model. In the following
	RDF model:

		anon1 --[property1]-> value1
		anon2 --[property1]-> value1

	anon1 and anon2 are separate (a serialisation will give them
	differing external identities) but they are equivalent (although
	not indistinguishable) in terms of their graph-theorietic
	properties in that model.

It turns out that some operations on RDF models become bloody tricky
using the "lifetime of a serialisation" idea. I'm still tidying up the
details.

jan

PS. I'm going to make some code available soon - would have been this week
but I had the 'flu :-(

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
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Received on Monday, 11 September 2000 09:40:14 UTC