- From: <Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com>
- Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:24:25 +0300
- To: phayes@ai.uwf.edu
- Cc: www-rdf-logic@w3.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> >For those who are convinced that anonymous nodes are a good > thing, please > >think about the implementational burden and > portability/interoperability > >issues they may introduce. > > What burdens and issues? . Specifically the need to refer to resources as a template of property values (i.e. [X namespace '...', X name '...']) rather than a single opaque URI identifier. Another is not knowing whether I will get back from a query an anonymous node constituting the root of a collection, containing resource nodes (or other collections) rather than an actual resource node -- or possibly getting a set of results having both resource nodes *and* collection root nodes -- because in one case in the *serialization* the values of a property were defined as a bag in the "same" statement and in another case each was defined as a separate statement! Yuck! Collections which remain discrete in the RDF graph with anonymous root nodes are in direct conflict to the need for efficient and transparent run-time syndication of knowledge from disparate sources. Why can't folks just admit that they were influenced too much by HTML and the need to define basic metadata for web pages, and just get rid of them?! Even if XML collection structures are used as conveniences to humans, such structures have no place IMO in the resultant graph constituting the knowledge base but should be fully and completely distilled into triples with no anonymous nodes whatsoever. Issues such as ordering, set membership completion, etc. can (and IMO should) all be addressed by additional statements about those collection statements defining source, authority, ordered ranking, etc. etc. And the proliferation of proposals for even more anonymous-node based constructs such as for solving the QName to URI mapping problem really worries me. The core, fundamental data models and mechanisms of the SW must be as simple, efficient, and consistent as possible if we ever are to achieve a critical mass of globally distributed knowledge. Regards, Patrick -- Patrick Stickler Phone: +358 3 356 0209 Senior Research Scientist Mobile: +358 50 483 9453 Software Technology Laboratory Fax: +358 7180 35409 Nokia Research Center Video: +358 3 356 0209 / 4227 Visiokatu 1, 33720 Tampere, Finland Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com
Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2001 06:24:31 UTC