RE: N3 contexts vs RDF reification

pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu> wrote:

>>
>>My understanding:
>>
>>Summary
>>=======
>>There are at least two competing proposals for representing contexts in
RDF.
>>The concept of 'context', although similar, differs slightly with respect
to
>>'higher-order' statements, ('reification' and making statements about
>>statements).
>
>I wonder, could I make a plea that y'all change your terminology here
>slightly? The term 'higher-order' already has an accepted usage now
>for about80 years, and it isn't this, so this is likely to cause all
>kinds of confusion and wasted time. What you are talking about is
>meta-language statements (statements about other statements), not
>higher-order statements.

Yes, higher-order is incorrect terminology.  I am a bit confused about
calling it a meta-language, though.  It depends on whether RDF is a
'language' or not.  Agreed certain RDF 'vocabularies' can be thought of as
languages, so in that sense it would hold true.

Though presumably I could more generally call it "meta-metadata" - the first
layer of statements represent data about data (metadata) - the next layer is
considered to be data about metadata (meta-metadata), ad nauseam.

regards
Lee

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 16:35:29 UTC