Re: abstract model and reification

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Seth Russell wrote:

> I'm having troubles following this discussion on reification because I haven't
> found a write up on the basic motivation for reification in the RDF model.   In
> particular im trying to find answers to the following questions:
> 1) Where is it necessary to reify and where not?

Where you need to make statements about statements; this includes
reflecting provenance information into an RDF model.

> 2) If we want to say something about a statement that is asserted in some
> context, why cant we just designate it's id as an object (see [1])?

This is Brian's approach. My personal belief is that there may exist
multiple resoruces which are reifications of any statement, and which
have other differing properties that prevent their being equivalent.

> 3) If all RDF statements (reified or not) are contained in some context, then
> why isn't that context alone sufficient to disambiguify any statement about
> another statement?
> 4) Where are there some concrete examples to motivate all of the above?

I'll punt on these alst two... Dan?

-- 
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
Bolstered by my success with vi, I proceeded to learn C with 'learn c'.

Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2000 06:11:08 UTC