Re: "If" and "else" in RDF

What Jan was asking for didn't seem to me to need if/then (as my example
showed) if gender was modeled as a property from which you could then look
up additional properties.

It wouldn't work if gender was modeled as subclass of Person and you wanted
"address" to be a property of the Person instance. In this latter case,
you'd need inference to say:

    if (X, rdfs:class, Male) then (X, address, "Mr.")
    if (X, rdfs:class, Female) then (X, address, "Ms")

James

> Jan Winkler asks:
>
> >Why is there nothing like if and else [in RDF] ?
>
> I think James Tauber has shown a way to do this in RDF.  But I still have
> some questions about what representing a  "if then\else"  relation in a
RDF
> model might mean:
>
> Doesn't the "if <class> then <value>"  construct need to be relative to
some
> active process?
>
> For example: if the RDF model knows {Seth isA Male} and {Male addressedBy
> "Mr"} and {[; young Male] addressedBy "boy"}, what is the value of the
> <value> ?
>
> In other words:  me thinks we will need to put the OO programming model in
> the RDF scheme of things before we will be able to do anything useful with
a
> "if\then" construct.    But I don't see any reason we shouldn't, I just
> don't know anybody who has .... do you?
>
> Seth
>
>

Received on Saturday, 28 April 2001 13:12:01 UTC