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.

Yes, if we are being very persnickety Im not sure of using any 
logical terms when talking about RDF.  But 'meta' seems appropriate 
to the 'reification' terminology; at least, thats how I have been 
understanding reification in the RDF context, ie if A reifies B then 
A is a statement in the metalanguage of the language of B. I'm not 
sure that I really grock reification in RDF, though.

>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.

We need a new term. How about metatadata?

Pat Hayes

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Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 20:52:14 UTC