Re: Contexts (spinoff from copy and wrap rdf statements)

At 7:45 AM -0800 2002-11-23, Seth Russell wrote:
>I agree with danny here, and I think the WG would also agree with 
>danny.  <http://somewhere/me.rdf><http://somewhere/me.rdf> 
>identifies a document.  Which is why we need #ThisGraph.  There is 
>currently nothing to refer to that *abstract* thing.  The document 
>is a tangeable physical thing that contains token strings.  The 
>graph is an abstract thing that contains triples.  The parser in an 
>application will turn the token strings from the document into 
>triples in the application's database.  If we are to talk about this 
>distinction in an interoperable manner, then we need a *standard* 
>way to refer to the document as opposed to the graph.

I still prefer to think of the resource being the information, and 
any particular document being a representation of the resource. For 
example, say <http://example.org/privacy> is the URI of a company's 
privacy policy, which might be available in multiple languages and 
formats and might vary over time. The actual bytes which you would 
receive (the representation) will vary, but the resource is constant.

Similarly, I would think of <http://somewhere/me.rdf> as being a 
dataset which can be expressed in terms of triples. Any RDF documents 
you get as a result of dereferencing the resource would be 
representations.

If you needed to refer to an actual RDF/XML document that you 
downloaded at a specific time, you could use something like:

_:a rdf:type eg:Representation;
     dc:source <http://somewhere/me.rdf>;
     dc:format "application/rdf+xml";
     dc:language "en";
     dcq:issued "2002-11-23t10:30:00z".

-- 
Dave Menendez - zednenem@psualum.com - http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/